Solar gave us a chance to generate funds.
To generate money.
It became a game changer for us.
Since the year 2014, we've saved $5.2 million.
For us, it very much was a lifeline in those years.
In Tucson, Arizona, where they have solar parking canopies installed on over 80 schools,
they expect to see $43 million in savings over 20 years.
Generation180 is a nonprofit organization
focused on accelerating the transition to clean energy in the United States.
And we're working to provide resources and support to help schools make that transition to clean energy.
My name is Gabriel Trujillo.
I am the superintendent of the Tucson Unified School District here in Tucson, Arizona.
We are one of the largest school districts in the state of Arizona.
We serve 42,000 students and we have just shy of 8,000 employees.
In terms of our school district, we operate 100 schools, just shy of 100 schools.
Our story began right around 2011.
During this time, Arizona and school districts around the state,
were suffering from the Great Recession's unprecedented cuts to school district budgets.
You also had major unemployment that led to a lot of families relocating out of the city of Tucson.
So, the district was very much in dire financial straits, in and around the year 2011.
The price of power started to skyrocket, as the effects of global warming have hit the desert southwest
here in the U.S. harder than anybody else.
So, you have these forces combining to challenge the district to say,
"How can we do things differently?"
By 2015, roughly one year after the first solar panel was installed,
we had solar panels installed at 43 of the district schools.
20 percent of the district's power.
By 2019, just shortly before the pandemic,
we have solar panels fully installed in 80 of our schools, powering almost 50 percent of the district.
We've saved $5.2 million.
You take away that 5.2 million, I'm not able to keep my employees with their yearly raises.
And then you get into all the nastiness of teachers leaving the district
and teacher shortage getting exacerbated and
bus drivers not seeing a raise and that's a hard to fill position and
assistants working in classrooms with students with disabilities not being able to get a raise.
So, to be able to keep the raises going,
knowing that we had these savings to do other stuff – like buy buses and replace computer labs,
which we would have had to do at the cost of not moving our employees forward.
Yeah, for us, it very much was a lifeline in those years.
Going solar can be expensive for school districts.
Sometimes a solar installation can cost up to a million dollars or more, depending on the size.
Our research found that 79 percent of the solar capacity installed on schools nationwide
was funded by third-party ownership.
Through these contracts, typically, a solar developer will
install, own, and maintain those systems for any length of time – typically 15 to 25 years or longer.
So, the benefit to the school is that any school can go solar, doesn't matter what their budget is,
the costs of the solar are incurred by the solar developer.
The additional benefits of a power purchase agreement
is that the school agrees to buy the energy produced by the solar panels,
but typically at a rate lower than what they would be paying the utility.
So, then, they're actually seeing savings from Day One.
We came into a relationship with Midstate Energy [a Veregy company] around 2013.
And the deal is until 2034.
So, in the year 2034, the solar panels will become ours.
Essentially, we're going to become a power producer.
We're going to own the very source of the electricity that we are generating.
There's opportunities for us to generate revenue from this power
and possibly be able to sell it back to the grid.
The most successful states for going solar have the most solar-friendly policies.
And that includes states in the northeast, like New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey.
And, of course, in sunny states, like California, Nevada, and Arizona, as well.
We see other success stories in Batesville, Arkansas, which is a very small school district
with only a handful of schools.
And they went solar and are going to see $4 million over 20 years in savings.
But the exciting part is that they're applying those savings to teacher pay.
So, some teachers are seeing up to $15,000 per year in raises,
all paid for by the energy savings from going solar.
For us to put students first, which is our motto – we put students first,
you have to start with teachers.
And our teachers were the worst in the area for pay.
We have a staff of about 250 teachers.
And we got another 250 classified or hourly help,
but 250 teachers.
And we used to have anywhere from 30 to 40 of them would leave us each year for better jobs.
And, I think, we're down to single digits now.
We are in the upper half of the state's salary,
we're number one in the area. So, we are attracting and retaining.
And we look forward to how all that affects our student achievement.
Solar gave us a chance to generate funds.
To generate money.
It became a game changer for us.
In our public school budget, it's nothing to have 75 to 85 percent of your budget is involved in personnel.
And so, when you can take your utilities, when you can take your footprint of your entire operations
and reduce the cost,
then you're able to apply that money – again, you have to work inside the budget, money you have.
Solar generates income, then, to add to that.
Nonprofits, in our case, have never had that option and solar creates that opportunity.
Through our report that we published last fall, we track the number of schools
that went solar in the United States up through the end of 2019.
And we found 7,332 schools with solar.
That's only 5.5 percent of schools around the country.
We would love to see that number go up to 100 percent.
We found that if all schools were 100 percent solar, we could reduce carbon emissions
equal to closing 18 coal-fired power plants.
That's a common myth I hear that the amount of sunshine
determines how viable solar is in your community.
We're finding that most of the restrictions that schools face to go solar are happening at the state level,
where each state and each utility may have different rules.
So, it's a patchwork of policies that you see around the country that might make it easier in California,
but more difficult in Alabama to go solar.
If you have a political climate in your state that says, "We want to cut taxes."
Let's say education is funded by maybe three different funds:
an income tax, a property tax, and sales tax.
If they cut one of those three legs off the stool, then it sends education reeling.
There's a fierce dividing line in the US between privatization and the public education infrastructure.
And because you're a public district, you have students with disabilities, you have non-English speaking
students, you have the poorest of the poor in your city and everybody comes into your building.
So, you rely on other means to try to bring revenue into the district.
You're relying on where you can save dollars and reinvest.
That's where solar has been very, very crucial
for us to be able to reinvest those dollars.
The reason we're excited about schools going solar is that it's contagious.
Schools inspire other schools to go solar.
When we see a success story in one community,
the neighboring school districts also want to get those benefits
and we see schools around them going solar, as well.
So it has this inspiring ripple effect that we'd love to see spreading
across communities in the US and spreading globally.