Issue Areas
After installing solar panels on its buildings, the school district is now using state and private grant funds to install microgrid battery storage systems at two high schools.
Roanoke City Public Schools plans to install solar-powered microgrids to store and distribute power for both of its high school buildings. The upgrades will be fully financed by a mixture of state funding and a private grant, and, combined with solar panel installations, are estimated to save millions of dollars in energy costs over the next few decades at a time when city budget cuts have created a $16.5 million annual budget deficit for Roanoke’s schools.
The project is part of a broader multi-year shift to solar energy by the school division, its director of communications Claire Mitzel told the Virginia Independent in a phone interview. 
“Over the past few years, we have been working with Secure Solar Futures on installing solar panels across, really, all of our buildings and schools,” Mitzel said. “Some of our schools and buildings do have solar panels, and the rest of the construction will be completed by the end of this calendar year, by the end of 2026, and at that time, solar power is expected to cover about 46%, almost 50%, of our school and building locations’ annual power usage.”
The power purchasing agreement for the panel project is expected to save the schools about $60 million over 35 years, according to Secure Solar Futures, the private company handling it. With the solar panels set to be in place at William Fleming and Patrick Henry high schools, both of which are designated emergency shelters for the community, Mitzel said the district applied for and received a $450,000 grant from the Virginia Department of Emergency Management to build solar-powered microgrids with battery storage systems for those buildings. 
“It’s truly a win-win-win,” Mitzel said. “It’s at no cost to our school division, which is also to say it’s at no cost to taxpayers. It has a direct benefit on our students, of course, and now on our city as a whole. And my understanding is that the microgrid part will be the first project of its kind in a public school division in Virginia.”
The state grant comes from the Virginia Emergency Shelter Upgrade Assistance Fund, which was established by a 2020 law written by Democratic state Sen. Louise Lucas and signed by Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam. The fund provides $2.5 million annually in grants to help local governments upgrade emergency shelter infrastructure and will be renewed under draft budgets passed by the House of Delegates and the Senate in February.
Robbie Coates, director of grant and recovery management for the Virginia Department of Emergency Management, said in an emailed statement that the grants are an investment in resilience and people: “Resilient infrastructure saves lives, reduces long-term costs, and helps Virginia come back stronger.”
The remaining $2.1 million of the cost for the microgrid will come from Secure Solar Futures. 
“We have been working with many school systems because they don’t have the capital to pay for solar, nor can they use the federal tax credits that we can use to lower the cost of the project,” company CEO Tony Smith told the Virginia Independent, noting that the battery storage projects “will work together with the very large-scale solar arrays we have on both schools, close to a megawatt of solar on each and so that will provide a very high degree of resilience and additional energy savings for the schools.”
Smith said that while his company — a B Corp business that works to balance profits with social purpose — is donating most of the money, the state funding helped make this project possible: “This is a critical time to get projects of this sort happening, because battery storage is a relatively new addition to the mix for solar projects, because the technology and costs of producing battery storage have changed dramatically in the last few years, and only until really this year are they beginning to be close to being financially viable. So the grant really helps overcome some of that risk of being a pioneer in this field.”
Smith said he hopes other Virginia school divisions follow Roanoke’s lead: “These kinds of projects not only help the customers, in this case the public school districts, or municipalities or hospitals or businesses, but they also really help the grid, because they provide services to the grid to make electricity provided by the utilities more reliable and less prone to blackouts or brownouts whenever the grid experiences high demand, because these batteries can inject energy back to the grid when it’s needed. And we learned this especially from the state of Texas, that after that winter storm in ’21 when they had rolling blackouts for eight days and subfreezing temperatures and over 200 people died, they have since become the nation’s largest solar and battery storage state.”

source