Resilient Facilities

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has defined facilities and critical infrastructure as entities “that are essential to the public safety and that require additional assistance and advance planning to ensure resiliency during de-energization events.”

Solar + Battery storage systems help ensure the most important facilities in your community — police stations, emergency operation centers, and more — can stay open during grid outages.

Starting in 2019, Ava (then East Bay Community Energy) began working with its member cities to assemble a list of hundreds of Critical Municipal Facilities across its service area, ranging from fire stations and emergency operation centers to community centers.

An initial portfolio-level assessment examined each site’s natural hazard exposure, service to the community, and solar and battery potential, providing a set of key sites with preliminary energy resilience system sizes. This initial assessment identified an aggregated capacity of approximately 10 MW of solar and 20 MWh of storage across Ava member cities.

As of May 2024, Ava is finalizing the solicitation of bids for power purchase agreements (PPAs) from qualified third-party developers to install, own, operate, and maintain solar photovoltaic and solar + battery energy storage systems for resilience and, where possible, cost benefits for partner cities. This is concurrent with our mission to develop and manage energy-related climate change programs that help local government JPA members achieve local and state goals.

Though Phases 1 & 2 are closed, Ava will explore additional phases with other target cities in the future, once the current program proves successful and repeatable.

To learn more about the Resilient Facilities program, please contact energyresilience@AvaEnergy.org.