Solar system up and running
- Mike Gerhardt
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
In April 2025, the Hall had a solar system installed by Blossom Solar. This addition to our facility has been in the planning for the past year, and we are thrilled to now be powering the Hall with clean, local electricity. We believe this is an investment that will pay off for the Hall and for our community in both the short- and long-run.
We are now very close to completely powering the Hall with electricity (only our older, failing hot water heater remains to be switched from propane to electric).
The System
We had three key goals with this project:
Lower our utility costs (currently around $2,600 per year), and ensure that higher energy costs and higher Hall usage in the future don't place an undue financial burden on the organization.
Switch away from fossil fuels to help lower our climate impact.
Start to build our capacity to act as a community resilience hub.
The 33 Silfab solar panels provide just over 14 kW of potential solar power, which is enough to cover our current electric use and to allow for future growth/expansion.
The solar system will be grid-tied with Puget Sound Energy, meaning we send excess electricity to the utility, and then get that back in 1:1 credit when we can't produce sufficient power (during the darkest winter months).
We also had one, 15 kWh capacity Franklin aPower2 battery installed, which means we will be able to more-easily provide power at the Hall during power outages. This is the start of what we hope to be a growing amount of backup capacity at the Hall; additional batteries can be added on to our existing system, providing more power in the event of longer-term emergencies or outages.
We've had a propane-powered backup generator at the Hall, but it's been challenging to use properly, and a bit of a pain to maintain in good working condition. For the time-being, we are keeping the propane generator, but hope in the future as we better understand our needs and use we will be able to move away from having this "backup to a backup".
Finally, we have installed a "smart" SPAN electrical panel that will allow us to better monitor and learn our electric use. This panel will also make managing the Hall in power outage scenarios easier and more effective.
In addition to the benefits to the Hall, we are excited to act as a demonstration site for others in our community who are interested in taking similar steps with solar, battert backup and electrification. Anyone who would like more details is encouraged to reach out if they'd like to learn more.
Energize The Hall
This solar system is part of our larger Energize The Hall campaign, which you can learn more about here. With this campaign, we aim to make the Hall cleaner, more resilient, and better able to serve our community for decades into the future.
Funding The System
Even if we paid the full cost of a solar array, we determined the Hall would save money in the long run (20-25 years). And that's before calculating the likelihood that electricity and propane costs will almost surely go up.
But fronting the costs for this $55,000 system would have been challenging for us to pull off without significant financial assistance. To that end, the Hall board has worked over the past year to secure several grants that paid for almost 70% of the solar system costs.
The Solar Moonshot Program is generously providing a $25,000 grant for our solar system. This program is part of Hammonds Climate Solutions Foundation, and is dedicated to helping nonprofit organizations across the United States afford the switch to clean energy. They have been terrific to work with, and are super focused with a "get things done" attitude, empowering many lower-revenue nonprofits across the United States to install clean energy solar systems.
More locally, two organizations stepped up to help make this project possible.
First, Whidbey Climate Action awarded the Hall a $5,000 grant towards our solar project. They not only helped us financially, but also provided critical input & advice on our larger Energize The Hall campaign. Early on, they helped us understand how a switch away from propane to electricity might work and what we could expect in terms of ongoing electric usage. Their $5,000 grant was part of Whidbey Climate Action's Whidbey Climate Fund (in partnership with Whidbey Community Foundation). Visit the link above to learn more about their efforts, and about other organizations on Whidbey they support.
Second, we received a $7,000 grant from The Norcliffe Foundation, a private family foundation that supports nonprofit organizations in the Puget Sound area. This grant really came at the right time, providing a kickstart to our efforts and giving us the confidence that we could make this all happen.
Together, these grants will pay for about 70% of our system. The Hall is investing the remaining 30%. We hope to get back that roughly $17,000 in the future via IRS Clean Energy Credits, which the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act allowed to be given as direct payments to nonprofit organizations. There is some uncertainty about this — and pretty much all federal programs — at this time. But even if for some reason we aren't able to recover that amount, we feel the money spent is a terrific investment in the future of the Hall.
