The San Antonio City Council approved the installation of solar panels at 42 municipal facilities, including on rooftops and over parking lots, last year. Six of those projects will be brought online Thursday.
The $30-million project was hailed by city officials as the largest on-site solar project in Texas, who also said the initiative will help the city make significant progress in its goal of having net zero emissions by 2050.
The initiative is expected to wrap up by fall of 2026 with the completion and installation of all 42 projects at select municipal facilities, Leslie Antunez, a spokeswoman for the city’s Office of Sustainability, said in an email.
The city has partnered with San Antonio-based Big Sun Solar, which is responsible for the installation and short-term maintenance of the new solar panel systems.
Funding for the project comes from several sources: $18.3 million from issuing bonds, $2.5 million from a 2% LoanSTAR loan from the State Energy Conservation Office and $10 million from Inflation Reduction Act tax credits. Doug Melnick, the city’s chief sustainability officer, said it would take about 10 years for the city to pay off the bond debt through savings incurred from the project. The project would then potentially be a generative source of income beyond that, he said.
“We’re one of the first cities in the country that are really going down this road, taking advantage of some of these federal incentives,” he said. “So everyone’s looking at us.”
The 42 installation will be spread across the city’s council districts and include four community resilience hubs, Melnick said. Twenty-three of the solar installations will take the form of parking canopies over existing surface parking lots, which will provide shade for vehicles.
Municipal buildings will still be backed by CPS Energy’s local grid system, for when more power is needed or if no solar power is being produced, Melnick said. But while CPS Energy is the city’s electric provider, this project will operate mostly separate from the utility, according to Melnick.
Once installations are complete, the city estimates the project will generate 12,718 kilowatts annually with a yearly estimated savings of $1.8 million for the city. That will offset an estimated 11% of the city’s electricity consumption and reduce emissions from city-owned buildings by about 18%.
Earlier this week, city staff proposed slashing a fund used for sustainability and energy efficiency to close the gap created by wage increases firefighters won in their recent union contract negotiations.
Melnick says this current project will not be affected and comes from other sources of funding.
“No department welcomes seeing budget cuts, but I think we understand what needs to be done,” Melnick said. “But the work is so important that we’ll find a way to keep it going. There’s no shortage of work for us to do.”
