City spent millions on solar panels. More than 1,000 panels have sat unused for 6 years.

More than 1,000 rooftop solar panels, part of a multimillion-dollar clean energy system set up by the city of Albuquerque in 2019, have sat unused in Downtown for six years.

Documents obtained by the Journal show more than $4 million in bond revenues was spent on solar panels for seven buildings — two of which are still not generating power and one that operates at 6% of its full capacity.

So what’s the issue? The pandemic, according to the city. Officials said the solar panels are supposed to come online by the end of this year — only six years late.

The investments are part of a longstanding campaign promise by Mayor Tim Keller to have the city operate on 100% renewable energy by 2025. The city is currently operating at 80% renewable power, according to the city’s Chief Administrative Officer Samantha Sengel.

She said what will get the city to 100% would be a measure to install solar panels on 25 more city buildings outside of Downtown. That bill received a unanimous “pass” recommendation from the Finance and Government Operations Committee on Monday and the full City Council will vote on it at a later date.

“Mayor Keller made a commitment for the city to meet our 100% renewable energy goal,” Sengel said. “It’s a bold commitment that’s meant to ensure that the city is thinking about long-term sustainability.”

Keller was not made available for an interview.

There are more than 1,000 solar panels hooked up but not generating power in Downtown: 180 panels at Civic Plaza; 240 at the old Albuquerque Police Department at the Rosenwald Building; and 600 on the Main Library.

“This is another one of Keller’s big promises with nothing to show for it,” City Councilor Dan Lewis said in a statement to the Journal. “He’s been given a blank check and taxpayers are left with nothing. I don’t know what Keller can do with another four years that he hasn’t been able to do in eight.”

Keller has already announced that he’ll be seeking an unprecedented third consecutive term from Albuquerque voters this November.

Getting the solar this year

By the end of 2025, all of the currently unused solar panels will be generating electricity, according to Dan Mayfield, a city spokesperson. The panels that are not producing power cost the city upward of $1.4 million to set up.

Public Service Company of New Mexico has already given the three projects permission to operate, according to PNM spokesperson Eric Chavez. He said the Main Library got permission in January 2022, the Convention Center got permission in November 2022 and the old APD building got permission in May 2023.

The city constructed its solar power system in 2019 based on PNM requirements, which are “very sensitive when it comes down to the network connection,” said Saif Ismail, Albuquerque’s energy and sustainability division manager.

Chavez explained that “back feed” of power onto the Downtown network could affect the power grid’s reliability. PNM doesn’t allow the total aggregated generation of projects to go over 50% of the project’s minimum load.

“The Downtown network provides power to a number of critical customers and infrastructure,” he said. “Therefore, PNM has protections in place to ensure reliability in that area.”

So when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 and power usage drastically dropped Downtown, requirements changed. Systems designed in 2019 to offset 2019 levels of electricity no longer matched up with 2020 levels of electricity.

“The projects proposed by the city were much too large at the time of proposal,” Chavez said, “and PNM suggested downsizing the projects based on the protection studies done prior to the city of Albuquerque beginning construction.”

But if PNM’s warnings didn’t have an effect, COVID did force the city to rethink its plans for energy distribution.

“So basically, during the pandemic, we started using so much less electricity that the interconnection rules … PNM had, didn’t work anymore for us,” Mayfield said. “And so, it’s kind of a good problem to have in that we’re using less electricity than we were in 2019.”

As an alternative, the city is now looking at ways to connect the solar panels set up in 2019 to different buildings, Ismail said.

“You can look at the grid Downtown as one big bucket of water, and if we keep putting more in it, we’ll break the bucket,” Mayfield said. “But we can put hoses into that bucket to other buildings.”

For example, there’s a five-story law enforcement building behind the Rosenwald Building to which the city wants to connect those panels, he said. The Civic Plaza panels could connect to City Hall in addition to the dozen that are already powering the Convention Center. And the city could relocate 300 panels from the Main Library — which currently has 600 panels — to Fire Station 9 and the new Northwest Multigenerational Center on the West Side, according to Mayfield.

The alternative to relocating the panels is letting them sit unused on the roofs — as some of them already have for six years — and wait for energy consumption to go up in the next five years before generating power with them. A typical solar panel’s lifespan is 30 to 35 years, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, so in this scenario, about a third of these solar panels’ lives would be non-productive.

In addition to rerouting power to adjacent facilities, Chavez said, PNM is considering other options like system size compared to load changes — like if load growth was to grow to pre-pandemic levels.

“The city of Albuquerque,” Chavez said, “has a very aggressive clean energy goal that we applaud and are excited to help them meet.”