In 2023, the City of Clayton signed a significant agreement with Climatec {climatec.com), in order to make improvements to the City’s infrastructure and pursue increase savings in the following areas: lighting, water, HVAC and Building Automated Systems (BAS), solar and electric vehicle charging. Our goal was to dramatically reduce the City’s energy consumption, improve maintenance and operational needs and save the City energy costs for years to come.
The funding for this initiative came primarily from a $1.9 million California Energy Commission (CEC) 1% loan through the Energy Conservation Assistance Act, in addition to a less than $150,000 investment from the City’s American Resuce Plan Act (ARPA) funds.
In early 2023, we created the Energy Services and Infrastructure Renewal Ad Hoc committee, made up of Vice Mayor Jeff Wan and myself, and part of our duties included providing oversight on the Climatec project, along with City staff, to ensure that the project stayed on course and that communication back to the community and entire Council was accurate and timely.
The scope of the project, which is now complete, included all new LED lighting on City-owned streetlights, pathways and city-owned building lights to enhance public safety and to maintain longer lasting equipment resulting in energy savings.
The next step was to install a new smart irrigation system, with a dashboard, that now allows the City to track major leaks, monitor flow and reduce water waste in the event of a break, resulting in long-term water saving costs.
The new HVAC modernizations, in City-owned buildings, have improved air quality, while the complementary BAS ensures that the HVAC systems maintain regulated temperature in all facilities. This included adding occupancy sensors which turn off indoor lighting when facilities are not being used.
Final step was the installation of a solar-mounted parking structure in the Maintenance building parking lot, which would provide energy to City Hall, the Maintenance shop, the Clayton Community Library, shade to police vehicles, and to a brand new two-vehicle EV Charging Station, located in the library parking lot.
In total, the City is now producing much of its own renewable energy and is projected to achieve Net Zero Energy status, meaning it will generate more renewable energy on-site than it consumes annually, very soon.
Additional energy saving improvements, began in September, when our partners at PG&E informed us that they would be completing a total LED light conversion of all of their PGE-owned streetlights (300+ streetlights) throughout the City.
Because of this project, and all of the hard work of our City staff, committee members and partners at Climatec and PG&E, we are now eligible to apply for an estimated $300,000 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) refund from the Federal government, which we are in the process of applying for right now.
The total lifecycle savings are $4,735,375. The net savings to the General Fund for years 1 through 5 will range from approximately $230,000 to $916,000 for this five-year period.
At the November 18, 2025, City Council meeting, staff will be proposing some modest budget savings as a part of a series of FY2025-26 budget balancing revisions. City staff will be monitoring electrical bills for additional budget savings over the next several months
Thank you to everyone at Climatec and its vendors, PG&E and our City Manager, Kris Lofthus, who brought this project over the finish line in September. To celebrate the completion of this project, we are planning to host a ribbon cutting ceremony, open to everyone in the community, sometime in November. Stay tuned for more details.
Because of these combined efforts, we as a City have advanced our conservation efforts, improved our infrastructure needs, updated our operational equipment, provided staff with supportive technology enhancements and are mitigating rising energy rates. We are now a smarter, greener and more efficient community, allowing us to reinvest our savings into other infrastructure needs and confirm our commitment to this community for generations to come.
Other News:
Join me on Wednesday, November 5, at 6:00 p.m. for a State of the City Town Hall at Hoyer Hall. I was joined by our City Manager, Kris Lofthus, and the entire leadership team at City Hall to talk about our progress this year and the City’s goals for the future. We hope you can join us, but if not, the presentation will be live-streamed and recorded and we will post it on the City’s website for future reference.