GRID Alternatives Builds East Bay Solar Community

For the third and final installment of our GRID Alternatives series, Getsolar hit the road and visited a GRID installation site in Oakland, California to gain a better understanding of how the organization is impacting some of California’s low-income communities.

10800 Edes Avenue in Oakland is home to a Habitat for Humanity East Bay, low-income housing structure. The colorful, multi-stage development that began in 2006 is a ongoing project and, visiting it, you’d never know that the land it stands on was previously a brownfield.

Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) has played a supporting role in this transformation. Working with Habitat for Humanity, the California utility sponsors the donation of a solar electric system for each new home Habitat builds in PG&E territory. The installation of these systems is handled by GRID Alternatives and Solar Power Partners, a large-scale solar power installation company. When all is said and done, each of Edes Avenue’s 54 homes will be equipped with a small rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) system of about 1.8 kilowatts (kW). In total, the project will come to roughly 90 kW.

While relatively small, the systems deliver meaningful savings. Families who have already moved in are benefiting from electricity bills that are $30 to $40 lower per month than they would be in the absence of solar panels. Some of the other homes, still in various stages of construction, have yet to have solar panels installed.

On the day of our visit, a warm and windy afternoon in June, roughly 20 GRID Alternatives volunteers and Solar Power Partners workers were positioning panels and working on wiring a single system into place atop a duplex that had already been erected. The third level of a scaffold provided a good vantage point from which to watch progress unfold. To the west, clear over a wall that separates already-occupied homes from the work site, there were cars parked in driveways and people bustled in and out of their homes. Some occasionally stopped to look up and observe the work in progress. Starting at ground-level, volunteers passed solar panels along a chain of hands up the scaffold. The panels were then placed side by side, mid-roof. It went on like this throughout the day, the workers making smooth and steady progress.

: PANEL PASSING: GRID Alternatives volunteers and SPP workers pass panels to the rooftop of an Edes Avenue home.

From GRID Alternatives’ perspective, the decision to take on the Edes Avenue project was an easy one — it was already completely funded, a fact that can make all the difference in the world. But beyond funding, a number of other site-specific factors dictate whether a given project is a good fit for solar — and for the organization. These variables hold true for just about any residential rooftop solar installation:

The roof in question must be in good condition. If necessary, GRID can sometimes help the homeowner replace or repair the roof. Other times, however, an old roof is a project killer.
The roof must also be in a non-shaded area — trees and tall buildings, in other words, are another type of project killer.
Ideally, the roof faces due south, as this ensures the solar panels receive optimal sun. Panels may be placed on roofs that have southeast or southwest exposure without substantially reducing system performance.

“You don’t really want to tell people to cut down trees so that they can have a solar energy system,” said GRID Alternatives volunteer Maura Fallon-Mcknight. “Sometimes it’s just not a good idea for them if there is too much in the way.”

Beyond the site-specific variables, which relate to the solar energy system, GRID Alternatives also, of course, weighs community-specific variables that relate to the organization’s mission of helping low-income California families. Homeowners interested in having GRID assess their particular situation and eligibility can sign up on the group’s website. But GRID’s Development Director Zach Franklin said that is not the way they connect with the majority of their beneficiaries.

“In terms of clients, the challenge is that the funding we have often times can be so specific that if we were just to say ‘hey, low-income folks, go to our website and maybe you can qualify,’ in most cases we can’t serve them unless they meet the criteria of all of the dollars we have,” Franklin noted.

The Edes Avenue site in Oakland met all the main criteria for GRID, Habitat for Humanity and PG&E.

As GRID Alternatives continues to expand, it seems the organization will maintain its focus on California. “Our focus is here [California],” said Franklin. “We have so much that we are working on and so much that we want to do.” Given that California is home to more than two million low-income homeowners, Franklin may have hit the nail on the head.

In case you missed it, check out the first two Installments of Getsolar’s three-part series on GRID Alternatives: