The most visible sign of the City of Ventura’s ongoing energy-efficiency campaign is a 123 kW solar photovoltaic (PV) array atop the city’s maintenance yard. It marks a big step toward one of the city’s energy-conservation goals: Creating a “net zero” electricity maintenance yard.
This system produces approximately 180,000 kilowatt hours of electricity annually—45%-50% of the electricity needed at the yard—and reduces the maintenance yard's daily peak demand in the summertime by about 100 kW. The city hopes that replacing the aging heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system and implementing other energy conservation measures will help close the gap between what the yard needs and the PV system can provide. The system is “grid-tied,” which allows the yard to pull extra juice from the power grid when needed, and to send any surplus back to the grid when it can’t be used.
Although the city was pleased with the system’s cost savings, environmental, and public relations benefits, it realized that even greater rewards could be achieved by improving the efficiency of the way this new electricity was used.
“We didn’t want to waste expensive, solar-generated electricity on inefficient lighting systems,” says Joe Yahner, the city’s Environmental Services supervisor. “With this in mind, we partnered with the Ventura County Regional Energy Alliance (VCREA) to develop energy efficiency projects at the maintenance yard and four other city-owned facilities.” VCREA is a consortium of local public agencies that provides training, technical support and financial incentives for qualifying energy efficiency projects.
Those projects included upgrading all of the lighting and adding motion sensors to turn off lights when not needed, plus Solatubes to bring natural daylight into a garage. Solatubes capture light through a dome on the roof and channel it down through an internal reflective system. Ventura also has replaced over 2,700 old lights with super-energy-efficient lights at City Hall, police/fire headquarters, and two parking structures.
The city has been working to improve its energy efficiency for several years, Yahner says, but the arrival of City Manager Rick Cole catalyzed “a larger, more holistic sustainability program called the Green Initiative.”
The City of Ventura’s energy-saving campaign was honored this year with an Energy Efficiency Award from the California Energy Commission and a Flex Your Power award. For details, visit www.fypower.org/feature/awards/.
To learn more about the city’s efforts, visit www.cityofventura.net/GreenVentura/.
Top: This 123 kW solar photovoltaic array atop the City of Ventura’s maintenance yard produces about half of the electricity needed at the yard, a big step toward the goal of creating a “net zero” facility.
Bottom: Solatubes and energy-efficient lights reduce demand. The round “light” in this photo is natural light from a Solatube, which captures sunlight through a dome on the roof and channels it down through an internal reflective system.
