After finishing second behind Los Angeles for three consecutive years, San Diego came in first place in the nation as the city with the most installed solar power.

“San Diego is setting a blazing example,” said Michelle Kinman, the clean energy advocate for Environment California Research and Policy Center, the organization that compiled its fourth annual Shining Cities report looking at solar data for major metropolitan areas across the country.

Solar power increased 60 percent in San Diego in 2016, reaching 303 megawatts of installed photo-voltaic capacity, finishing 36 megawatts ahead of Los Angeles and almost 60 percent higher than Honolulu and San Jose, which finished third and fourth.

In the previous report, San Diego racked up enough installed capacity to power 47,000 homes. In the latest rankings, released Tuesday, the number grew to nearly 76,000 homes.


“It’s great to be No. 1,” said Mayor Kevin Faulconer. “It just validates all the work we’ve been trying to do as a city and as a region on sustainability and a clean energy future.”

On a per capita basis, Honolulu finished first in the nation with 495.2 watts for each person. San Diego came in second at 217.6 watts per person.

The report was released at Kearny High School, where 1,022 solar panels have been installed on the school’s parking lot, accounting for a maximum of 240 kilowatts. School officials said students have developed their own plans dealing with climate policies.

The solar power systems at the San Diego Unified School District produce more than 7.4 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year and Superintendent Cindy Marten said Tuesday the district has plans to build eight more systems this year and 12 more in 2018, which would more than double solar output in the next two years.


Is that a good return on taxpayers’ dollars?

Lee Dulgeroff, chief of planning and construction at San Diego Unified, said the solar expansion will cost roughly $40 million over the next two years at the 20 sites and save about $2.8 million per year.

That works out to about 14 years to pay off.

“It’s a pretty clear-cut financial case for installing solar power,” said Dulgeroff. “The big benefit is for the environment … but there is a financial savings to the district that we can put back into classrooms because it comes right out of the operational budget.”


The report comes as solar energy continues to grow across the country. In 2016, solar was the top source of new energy installed in the U.S. and the top 20 cities in the Shining Cities report have nearly as much solar today as the entire country had installed in 2010.

“The price of solar has come down about 75 percent in the past 10 years alone and that’s an incredible drop,” Kinman said.

Faulconer helped spearhead an aggressive clean energy goal for San Diego, the Climate Action Plan, that calls for 100 percent of the city’s energy coming from renewable sources and cutting the city’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2035.

San Diego has made inroads but how difficult will it be to reach the 100 percent goal as 2035 nears?


“As we get closer I think there will be new technologies that we don’t even know about now or that are in the infancy stages that will help us achieve that goal,” Faulconer said. “Part of how we develop the Climate Action Plan is, let’s do what we can with technologies that we have.”

The state has also instituted a host of clean energy mandates, including financial incentives for people to buy zero-emission vehicles as well as a 50 percent target for renewables by 2030, set by Gov. Jerry Brown.

In February, California’s Senate pro tem Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, introduced a bill calling on the state to get 100 percent of its electricity from clean sources by 2045.

Reaching those goals, analysts say, is hard to predict and some critics have warned that costs could rise dramatically.


“One of the things that I’m really looking at is energy storage,” Kinman said. “I think when you see the coupling of solar energy and battery storage, that’s where it makes it possible to get to that 100 percent point. So there are a lot of people now talking about how can we incentivize battery storage just as we did with solar energy 10 years ago.”

Top Solar Cities

Total PV Installed (megawatts)

1. San Diego 303


2. Los Angeles 267

3. Honolulu 175

4. San Jose 174

5. Phoenix 165


6. Indianapolis 127

T7. New York City 117

T7. San Antonio 117

9. Albuquerque 82


10. Las Vegas 75

Source: Environment California


Business

rob.nikolewski@sduniontribune.com

(619) 293-1251 Twitter: @robnikolewski