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After years of study and engineering, a long-awaited solar energy plan that will augment the electricity needs of the Los Alamitos Unified School District for the next 30 years is finally underway.
The district formalized an agreement with PFMG Solar (which has since changed its name to Luminace), a Huntington Beach company with a unanimous vote in October of 2020.
The company is now based in New York City, according to its website, but retains its Huntington Beach office.
The board approved a 30-year Power Purchasing Agreement that calls for the construction of solar arrays at each school site and is expected to save the district $16-20 million over the 30-year life of the agreement.
At the time the agreement was approved in 2020, district officials said Luminace will install and maintain all of the solar equipment at no cost, and the district had negotiated an agreement to purchase the power produced by the arrays at a price of $15.6 per kilowatt hour.
LAUSD officials have estimated their current Edison rate at approximately 0.17 per kilowatt hour and, as if electricity rates rise in the next three decades, the district’s price per kilowatt hour produced by the solar arrays won’t change.
The solar program is designed to eventually supply approximately 75 percent of each site’s electricity demand, according to earlier presentations by LAUSD officials.
Director of Facilities C.J. Knowland, Jr., told the LAUSD board at their Feb. 8 meeting that the district had received construction approvals from regulators and that the construction of a district wide solar array is expected to begin in March.
“It doesn’t necessarily cost the district any money up front, but we want to make sure during the construction that our sites are able to operate efficiently and there’s the least impact possible to our sites,” he said.
As a result, Knowland said they have worked out a schedule to minimize disruption by solar construction that has workmen beginning the buildout at Weaver Elementary, in Rossmoor, and ends at the high school during the summer break.
The solar equipment will be owned, serviced, and maintained by Luminace, he said.
In addition, if they do not produce the minimum amount of energy for which they have contracted, the district will be reimbursed, district officials have said.
“That’s the beauty of us not owning the system,” LAUSD Superintendent Dr. Andrew Pulver said when the agreement was signed.
Knowland said a contractor has notified the district that they are likely to start construction in mid-March and that the various crews will “lag” behind each other at each installation.
Simplified, it means track layers might finish in two weeks, then move to another school, and the panel layers would follow-up behind them and so on until the project was completed.
Total construction at each site is expected to take between 90-120 days.
