Solar at Barham Villas Goes Live
Posted
August 9, 2023
This makes Barham Villas one of the most sustainable communities in the San Diego county and gives us a path forward to continue our journey, hopefully deploying this program across many sites in our portfolio.
The Process
For the residents living at Barham Villas, it is no secret that over the last year we have been working to install hundreds of photovoltaic panels across every building in the community. Months of construction and notices are hard not to notice. However, this huge achievement has now become a reality with SDG&E giving us the allegorical flip of the switch, turning our system into a live, energy-producing step towards a better tomorrow.
Unique in the Multifamily Sector
While solar energy is a relatively well understood concept, and several communities use solar panels to offset their own common-area usage, it might come as a surprise to know that the multifamily sector is a particularly difficult environment to integrate full-property solar energy. The nature of utility privacy laws, the steep upfront costs in the millions, utility company politics and lack of overall system integration are all major roadblocks. Then acknowledging the difficulty of on-site operations and the fact that there just isn’t enough information available to fully understand the long-term impact of solar in the multifamily space, and it’s a little easier to see why this hasn’t been widely adopted. Thankfully, we were able to partner with the California-based company, IVY Energy, that seems to have innovated their way through most of the unknowns surrounding this very difficult process.
The Outcome
Through our willingness to invest in innovation we can say that we are now the proud owner/operators of a community completely powered by the sun. This makes Barham Villas one of the most sustainable communities in the San Diego county and gives us a path forward to continue our journey, hopefully deploying this program across many sites in our portfolio.
As ambassadors of multifamily housing, one of the biggest areas of opportunity for the fight against climate change, we have the means to make a huge and rippling impact on the places around us.
Today marks a big step in that journey as we proudly embrace sustainable energy at Barham Villas Apartments.
