A community college in Southwest Virginia plans to have more than 1,600 solar panels installed on the roofs of its classroom buildings this summer.
The project will make Mountain Empire Community College in Big Stone Gap the first community college in the state to enter into a power purchase agreement, or PPA, which means the college will buy solar power from the energy company installing the panels rather than owning the panels outright.
While officials expect the school to save money on energy costs, the larger benefit is expected to come from the boost to the college’s workforce training program for energy technology, with students able to get hands-on experience in the growing field of solar power.
“It’s just about making sure that our students and our region have good-paying jobs that are relevant, that can allow them to go where they want to go, to stay home if they want to stay home, and still be able to make a good living,” Mountain Empire Community College President Kris Westover said of solar-industry workforce training.
Mountain Empire Community College serves residents of Dickenson, Lee, Scott and Wise counties, plus the city of Norton.
When Westover arrived at Mountain Empire in 2017, the school offered solar training, but it was difficult to get students interested in it because they couldn’t see job opportunities at the other end, she said.
“There wasn’t a whole lot of commercial or residential solar going on in our region. So if students did want jobs, they kind of had to leave the region in order to work in the solar field,” Westover said.
During the pandemic, she met Tony Smith, president of Secure Solar Futures, a Staunton-based solar developer, and the two began discussing how to strengthen solar opportunities via power purchase agreements, a path made possible by recent state legislation.
In 2022, Secure Solar Futures and a local electrical contractor worked with approximately a dozen students to install solar panels on public schools in Lee and Wise Counties.
A grant from the Virginia Coalfields Economic Development Authority paid the students’ hourly wages while they earned credit at Mountain Empire.
The project was supported by the Solar Workgroup of Southwest Virginia, a coalition of nonprofits, schools, government agencies and businesses that seeks to help grow a locally rooted solar industry in seven Southwest Virginia coalfield counties, including those served by Mountain Empire.
School officials in Lee and Wise counties expressed interest in developing the local workforce, Smith said.
“They didn’t want to see their students getting all this education, then being forced to leave the community because of the lack of jobs,” he said.
That work inspired the Mountain Empire project.
“We decided that when the Virginia Community College System had a power purchase agreement opportunity, we wanted to jump in and kind of use that same model here at the college,” Westover said.
The college has some solar arrays on campus, including a mobile solar unit nicknamed “Sparky” that can be used to power outdoor events.
“But we wanted to be able to have a lab right on our campus, to have solar on our campus, to showcase green energy and hopefully save some money at the same time,” Westover said.
These efforts come as Virginia progresses towards a goal set by the 2020 Virginia Clean Economy Act of achieving 16,100 megawatts of solar or onshore wind energy.
Much of that so far has been solar. More than 4,700 megawatts of solar has been installed in Virginia as of late last year, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. Meanwhile, there’s only one onshore wind project in the pipeline in Virginia: a 75-megawatt wind farm in Botetourt County that is expected to break ground this summer after nearly a decade of delays.
Details of the Mountain Empire project
The plan for Mountain Empire Community College calls for Secure Solar Futures to create a 777-kilowatt solar power system using 1,679 solar panels manufactured by the Chinese firm Jinko Solar.
The college’s Dalton-Cantrell Hall will have 117 of those kilowatts of capacity, which will handle 47% of the building’s electricity demand, according to Secure Solar Futures. A cluster of buildings located near each other — Godwin Hall, Holton Hall, Robb Hall and Phillips-Taylor Hall — will have 659 kilowatts, covering 29% of their electricity demand.
The panels will be connected to the electrical grid, but under an arrangement known as net energy metering, the value of the power generated by Mountain Empire’s system will be credited to the college.
Whatever additional power Mountain Empire needs can still be drawn from the grid, and if the college produces extra energy it can sell it back.
During the 25-year term of the PPA, Secure Solar Futures will own and operate the panels. After that term is up, Mountain Empire will have the option to buy the panels and operate them for what the company says is likely to be another 10 to 15 years of productive life.
Officials project a net savings of $500,000 over 25 years and $2.3 million over 35 years, Westover said.
Roanoke City Public Schools recently entered into a similar agreement with Secure Solar Futures for a 1.7-megawatt system, while Roanoke County is seeking proposals for a pilot solar program at Cave Spring High School.
Mountain Empire’s solar project was boosted by a $100,000 grant from the Coalfield Solar Fund, which is a partnership among Intuit, perhaps best known for its TurboTax software; National Energy Education Development, or NEED, a nonprofit that specializes in K-12 energy education; and Secure Solar Futures.
Similar to the projects in Lee and Wise counties, Mountain Empire’s solar installation has support from the Solar Workgroup of Southwest Virginia.
It’s also backed by the Solar Finance Fund, a regional effort led by the nonprofit Appalachian Voices that provides financial and technical assistance to solar projects in Central Appalachia.
Smith, of Secure Solar Futures, said he envisions developing a cluster model of solar workforce training in Southwest Virginia and part of West Virginia, with multiple community colleges drawing from the K-12 schools in their areas to educate the next generation of solar technicians.
Building up a solar industry in Southwest Virginia’s historically coal-heavy counties would evolve the region “from an extractive economy to a generative economy,” Smith said.
“That’s the whole notion of a solar regional cluster, to achieve that transformation that creates comparative advantage for a region so that it can continue as the energy capital of Virginia,” he said.
The power of PPAs
By entering into a power purchase agreement with Secure Solar Futures, Mountain Empire Community College won’t have to pay the upfront cost of purchasing and installing solar panels.
New River Community College in Pulaski County recently looked into purchasing a 600-kilowatt solar system but is reevaluating its options after bids came in too high, said Bert Jones, associate vice chancellor for facilities management services for the Virginia Community College System.
With a PPA, the solar provider maintains the panels, too.
“They’re the experts in that area. We are not,” Jones said.
Such a service naturally comes at a cost. An organization that signs on to a PPA must pay a subscription fee to the solar provider.
But the hope is that over time, the fixed price for purchasing power via the solar company will yield savings compared to buying electricity directly from a utility.
“We will never do a deal with a customer where they’re not saving money,” Smith said.
One challenge that comes with installing solar panels is that a building’s roof sometimes must be improved first. At Mountain Empire, officials determined that several roofs needed to be modified to ensure that they would last as long as the panels are expected to last, and one roof that was already near the end of its life needed to be replaced.
“Part of the analysis is, will the structure of the building support solar panels?” Jones said.
Even if a roof needs upgrading, it’s usually cheaper to go that route than to install a ground-mounted solar array, which requires additional infrastructure such as frames and brackets, he said.
“Really the most cost-effective solution is, put it on the big flat surfaces that you have,” Jones said.
The process to develop and negotiate the PPA took more than two years from start to finish, Jones said.
But if other community colleges or state agencies want to follow in Mountain Empire’s footsteps, they won’t have to reinvent the wheel, as Jones designed the PPA contract so it can be used by others.
If Mountain Empire’s solar project succeeds, it could be a model for other community colleges.
“All eyes are on this project with MECC. Before the community college system allows other PPAs to go forward, they want to see how well this works,” Smith said.
Solar education in Virginia’s community colleges
While Mountain Empire will be the first Virginia community college to purchase solar power through a PPA, it’s far from the only community college educating solar technicians.
Since 2019, at least 200 students across seven community colleges have earned solar-industry credentials through the FastForward program, a short-term workforce training initiative that helps students earn industry credentials and certifications based on the needs of employers.
“What we’ve been training folks on, it gets them the skills they need to enter the field,” said Randy Stamper, associate vice chancellor for career education and workforce programs for the Virginia Community College System.
At Mountain Empire, Secure Solar Futures will help provide workforce training.
Elsewhere within the community college system, a significant portion of developing solar training has been supported by SHINE, which stands for Solar Hands-On Instructional Network of Excellence.
SHINE is a public-private partnership begun by Southside Virginia Community College and the Maryland-D.C.-Delaware-Virginia Solar Energy Industries Association.
It was founded in 2018 when solar industry stakeholders saw a need for a solar-capable workforce in Virginia, said SHINE Executive Director David Peterson.
“Even prior to that, the project pipeline in Virginia was indicating that we were going to have trouble meeting the need for workforce at the local level,” Peterson said.
The programs it develops train students for anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks. The shorter programs came about as a result of an industry demand for workers who could be available on tight “just-in-time” construction schedules, Peterson said.
The traditional model for solar construction has been to bring in a team of traveling technicians, Peterson said.
“You get a workforce where you know they know what they’re doing and you can hew more vigorously to a rigorous production schedule,” he said.
But using traveling workers means localities miss out on the full benefits of a solar project. Instead, SHINE aims to help Virginians pursue solar careers and give localities an opportunity to reap the economic benefits of having a homegrown workforce.
And while solar education programs in Virginia typically focus on large, utility-scale construction, many of the skills are transferable to smaller residential and commercial solar installations.
The politics of solar energy
Utility-scale solar energy projects have met with some resistance in Virginia. In recent years, a number of localities — particularly in Southside, which has seen some of the state’s biggest solar growth — have been considering or implementing limits on how much utility-scale solar they’re willing to accommodate.
Legislation discussed during this year’s General Assembly attempted to address such local resistance as Virginia works to meet its state-mandated clean energy goals.
Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville, and Del. Rip Sullivan Jr., D-Fairfax County, proposed companion bills that would allow state regulators to approve large renewable energy projects over local government objections if the projects meet certain requirements.
Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Henrico County, proposed a law that would prevent local governments from enacting blanket bans on solar projects, instead requiring them to have processes to consider such projects on a case-by-base basis.
Both legislative initiatives were carried over for another year.
Nonetheless, new projects continue to enter the pipeline. Earlier this month, officials in Buckingham County approved an 80-megawatt project on more than 1,000 acres, dubbed Mountain Pine Solar.
SHINE tracks the progress of Virginia solar projects that are at least 1 megawatt.
Peterson said it uses a combination of information from media reports, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and an analysis of the queue of projects waiting to be connected to PJM, the regional transmission organization that coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity in 13 states plus Washington, D.C.
According to SHINE’s analysis, more than 430 solar projects are in development around the state, representing nearly 3.8 gigawatts of energy. Of those, more than 180 projects representing more than 1.7 gigawatts of energy are in Southside and Southwest Virginia and the Alleghany Highlands.
Peterson said that front-line utility-scale construction jobs typically start at around $20 per hour, and some more experienced senior workers on solar projects can earn six-figure salaries, he said.
SHINE’s ongoing analysis helps students see where there are job opportunities in the industry, Peterson said.
“The last thing we want to do is certify somebody and say, ‘Good luck going out there and finding a job,’” he said.