Solar and Microgrid Projects

Regional Renewable Energy Procurement

The Regional Renewable Energy Procurement Project (R-REP) utilizes collaborative procurement to purchase renewable energy systems for public agencies throughout Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, and Santa Clara Counties. The R-REP includes 19 participating agencies across four counties, including cities, counties, special districts, and schools, with 180 renewable energy installation sites totaling 30 MW.

The City of Fremont has installed renewable energy at four municipal facilities. These include solar panel projects at the Police Complex (872 kW), Aqua Adventure Water Park (226 kW), Maintenance Center (349 kW), and Irvington Community Center (83kW), totaling over 1.5 MW of solar.

Together, these systems offset 14% of the City's electricity consumption for all municipal operations, and reduce municipal greenhouse gas impact by 5%. These reductions are the equivalent of 422 homes' worth of electricity usage, and offset the same amount of carbon as sequestered by 13,205 tree seedlings grown for 10 years.

Fire Station Microgrids

Three fire stations (6,7, & 11) in Fremont have been equipped with solar photovoltaic (PV) carports and large battery systems to increase their energy resiliency and bolster their capacity to operate during power outages. This combination of solar panels and batteries allows each station to generate and store its own energy with the ability to separate or “island” from the grid in case of an emergency. City staff are able to monitor generation and usage via cloud-based energy management software.

The project is a public-private partnership between the City of Fremont, the Fremont-based clean technology firm Gridscape Solutions (Gridscape), and the California Energy Commission (CEC). Each station is equipped with 95 kWh of energy storage and a 40 kW solar canopy. The project is expected to save the City a combined quarter million dollars in energy costs over the next decade while decreasing the municipal greenhouse gas footprint by 80,000 pounds of CO2 per year, which is equivalent to 36 MTCO2e.

Fire station microgrids provide multiple benefits to the City and community: reducing energy demand on the grid through the use of storage technology, protecting critical facilities against power outages, supporting local innovation and entrepreneurship, increasing community resilience, saving money, and reducing carbon emissions.