The Clean Coalition conducted a Solar Siting Survey for East Bay Community Energy’s (EBCE) Local Business Development Plan. The Local Development Business Plan was intended to develop a comprehensive framework for accelerating the development of clean energy assets within Alameda County in California. It includes details on how EBCE’s Community Choice program can contribute to fostering local economic benefits, such as job creation and community energy programs, plus identify opportunities for clean local energy development.
Developing the local solar projects identified in this survey can help create a stronger, more resilient grid in Alameda County. By pairing distributed solar with other distributed energy resources, such as energy storage, demand response, and electric vehicle charging infrastructure, the County can establish Community Microgrids and Solar Emergency Microgrids. These innovative configurations can be designed to provide indefinite renewables-driven backup power to critical facilities in the event of regional power outages. With the addition of energy storage combined with solar, many of the large solar sites identified in this survey are prime candidates for these applications.
The Clean Coalition’s EBCE Solar Siting Survey identified over 650 megawatts (MW) of technical solar siting potential on over 250 discrete sites — enough to power 165,000 homes. Each site identified has the potential to host at least 1 MW on rooftops, parking lots, and parking structures located at the site.
While this survey identified solar siting opportunities of at least 1 MW in size, there is also siting potential for smaller PV projects in Alameda County. With a minimum project size of 500 kW, the Clean Coalition expects a technical solar siting potential of 1.2 gigawatts (GW); a minimum project size of 100 kW would likely have uncovered over 2 GW of solar siting potential.
EBCE Solar Siting Survey (Google Map)
EBCE Solar Siting Survey (Google Earth file)
EBCE Solar Siting Survey summary (PDF)
EBCE Solar Siting Survey data (Excel spreadsheet)
The EBCE Solar Siting Survey data spreadsheet contains details for each site that are used to create the Solar Siting Survey map.
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