Rancho Cucamonga, California

sites that they thought might be feasible for a solar project. At the end of it, Rancho Cucamonga wound up being the only city in the county that moved forward. It’s called Solar RC. We installed a solar energy system at five City-owned sites. That included our Civic Center location and our Central Park, which is our main community and Senior Center. We also put it out at our minor league baseball stadium called the Epicenter – that’s where our Animal Center is, as well. And it went on a couple of our major fire stations. “We installed this through a direct purchase – we paid, upfront, for the system and that system is going to save us $6 million over the next 25 years. We’ve been quite pleased with it. The initial savings the first couple of years has exceeded what was forecast. Beyond the obvious benefits of reduced impact on the environment and reduced energy usage, we got some great parking/shade structures at a couple of our major parking lots, which really help, both in winter and summer, for people to have a place under shelter to park. “Paired with that project was our LED street light project. We took over ownership of 15,000 of our street lights from Southern California Edison, and we did that for a couple of reasons. One was that there was a savings on reduced maintenance costs of about 80 percent a year because we were more efficient. The second part of it was after we purchased those lights, we did a full conversion of all 15,000 to LED. That conversion reduced our energy usage by about 66 percent and it further increased the maintenance savings because LEDs have much longer life. And when one LED goes out, you don’t lose an entire street, the way you can with regular bulbs. That project is going to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by a little over 1,000 metric tons and save us about $1.3 million in energy and maintenance costs over the ten-year lifespan of the project. So, it cost us $3 million to do that, but we will actually save about four times that in energy and maintenance costs. It’s saving us enough money that it’s paying back the money we used upfront to purchase the street lights. So those have been two of our green projects – helping the environment while improving our bottom line.”