Rooftop or Canopy? Why Not Both!
Sacred Heart Home Skilled Nursing & Rehabilitative Care
New Bedford, MA
About the Customer
A member of the Diocesan Health Facilities group, Sacred Heart Home is a skilled nursing center located in New Bedford, Massachusetts. It serves 190 adult men and women, with comprehensive health services from skilled nursing and rehab programs to specialized Alzheimer’s care, pain management, and palliative care, with a dedication to helping its residents maintain the best quality of life.
Customer Situation
Established in 1923, Sacred Heart Home is an older building. Given the extensive array of equipment needed to support its residents and patients, as well as the heating, ventilation and air conditioning challenges of a building of this vintage, Sacred Heart Home faced very high electric bills. Management sought a solution to reduce operating costs, and determined that solar would offer significant financial benefits. Additionally, given its age and end of useful life, the building required a new roof.
Resonant Energy has completed 9 projects with the Catholic Diocese of Fall River over the last 6 years, totaling 1.2 MW of solar and representing $4.2 million in solar investment. Upon recommendation from the Diocese, Sacred Heart engaged Resonant for this solar project.
Resonant Solution
As Massachusetts’ leading provider for non-profit solar installations, Resonant Energy took the time at the outset of the project to thoroughly understand Sacred Heart Home’s unique needs and objectives for installing solar. Resonant ran an extensive analysis of more than two dozen different financing and incentive options available to Sacred Heart Home. Some of the considerations included
Power Purchase Agreements (PPA) and lease options which would limit upfront cost
Direct Ownership of solar which would generate the highest lifetime savings, but might require a loan
Connecting the roof and canopy or designing them as two separate systems
Optimizing the size of the solar system based on available space or policy incentive thresholds
As a result, Resonant was able to develop a custom solution for Sacred Heart Home:
Two systems were designed and installed: a rooftop and a canopy. The two systems were metered separately to keep both below 250 kW-AC and maximize the incentives for each system. This also allowed the rooftop system to move to installation while the more complex canopy project was being permitted.
The rooftop is set up as a standalone meter to optimize the benefits of the incremental benefits known as “adders” within the Massachusetts SMART program.
The solar canopy is configured behind the meter, which means the power generated is directly offsetting the building's electricity usage. This allows Sacred Heart to directly offset its electricity bills with power from the canopy while power from the rooftop is sent to its account via electricity credits.
The final combined systems produce enough energy to offset 50% of the nursing home’s electricity usage.
Resonant also helped Sacred Heart Home to manage multiple upgrades to the building and grounds (electric panel upgrades and parking lot drainage), which were required to secure canopy permitting.
Given that Sacred Heart Home wanted to directly purchase and own its solar system, Resonant focused on opportunities to maximize the project’s federal and state tax incentives. Resonant was able to secure a 30% tax credit for the rooftop array and 50% tax credit on the canopy, which included an additional 10% credit for domestic content equipment and 10% for the competitive low-income location-based adder.
Customer Situation
The solar implementation exceeded all of Sacred Heart Home’s financial objectives. Specifically, the $1.8 million canopy is delivering a 12.68% internal rate of return (IRR), and the $500,000 rooftop provides an 8.64% IRR. The canopy system is expected to break even in year 8 and the rooftop in year 10, with an expected total lifetime savings of $2.8 million.
“The team over at Resonant Energy was nothing short of excellent to work with. From the planning phase, the execution, and everything in-between, they delivered on their promises. Every step of the way, they were 10 steps ahead. The meetings were informative and the daily emails were transparent. Every piece of the project was always well-coordinated and flowed with such ease. As a project manager myself, I can confidently say that Resonant really took the challenge out of a large-scale project. This was by far the smoothest one I’ve been a part of, and I would recommend Resonant Energy to anyone who is looking for solar power or might be on the fence about it. You’ll wish you did it sooner!”
Daniel Guerra
Facilities Manager