Richmond’s RYSE Center, a nonprofit on Bissell Avenue that primarily serves youths of color, offers a safe haven for the city’s teens to organize with their peers, learn skills and heal from trauma.
In response to the increasingly intense impacts of climate change, RYSE has expanded its services, adding two new buildings, including a health center and daily gathering space that doubles as a resiliency hub in climate emergencies. With a large solar array and solar storage battery, it’s designed to provide electricity during heat waves, power outages, wildfires, and other emergencies. In those situations, local youths and their families can seek shelter from the elements, get cool with air conditioning, breathe filtered air and use stored solar power to charge their electronics and life-saving medical equipment.
But delays in getting the final required permits from Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E) have hobbled the potential of this vital infrastructure — one the RYSE team hopes will serve as a county triage center if there’s a larger emergency, such as a wildfire at the scale of the ones that devastated parts of Los Angeles.
The resilience hub was completed in the spring of 2022 and RYSE sent permit applications for the solar system that November, but the center still doesn’t have full use of the storage battery system. Although the city approved it, RYSE and its partners say PG&E delays have kept them from getting the permits required to connect to the local power grid and use the solar battery system.
“We still can’t do it. And it’s not because we didn’t raise the money [or] build the system. It’s not because we didn’t do our part. It’s because of PG&E,” said Dan Reilly, RYSE’s former innovations director who led the development of the resilience hub.
Reilly spearheaded a partnership with the advocacy nonprofit Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), which helped fund the project, and the Berkeley-based solar energy contractor Sun, Light and Power.
RYSE solar project not at full potential due to permit delays
Shina Robinson, resilience hubs manager with APEN, sees the RYSE hub as a chance to demonstrate some of the broader change that APEN wants to see in Richmond.
“We started partnering with them around getting solar and a process to talk to youth about what it means to have examples of clean energy in their neighborhood while being in the face of the Chevron refinery,” Robinson said.
The solar battery will enable RYSE to control power usage at the center, a feature that has multiple benefits. Being able to turn off power adds an extra safety measure if there’s a wildfire. And at the daily level, rather than discharging the collected solar energy back to the local power grid, RYSE can use the battery system to power its buildings. During peak energy usage hours — in the late afternoon and early evening when power is more expensive — this approach can reduce the nonprofit’s energy costs and reduce demand on the local grid.
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“By the time this is all squared away, we will be looking at almost three years of this client’s battery project being placed on hold, all due to receiving conflicting (PG&E) instructions.”
— Tara Akins, Sun, Light and Power
Robinson said the youths at RYSE hope to find ways to reinvest these energy savings into future programs that benefit the community.
But two years of delays mean the savings are also delayed. RYSE, which operated with a total revenue of a little more than $9 million in 2023, hasn’t been able to reap those benefits yet.
PG&E implied in an emailed statement to Richmondside that the delay was related to Sun, Light and Power not yet having a required California Energy Commission certification for the battery system.
“It is crucial that the third-party contractor obtain the necessary certifications from the vendor so that PG&E can determine what additional actions or documentation might be required on this project. We cannot estimate, design or connect this project until the contractor has obtained these certificates,” PG&E spokesperson Jennifer Robison wrote.
Permitting the solar battery isn’t the only challenge RYSE has faced with the utility company. According to Reilly, PG&E also took nearly two years to update its transformer equipment to work with the solar panels and enable interconnection in RYSE’s legacy building, a process that shouldn’t take more than 182 days to accomplish, according to California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) regulations.
The result: RYSE was making do with a system operating at roughly 70% of its full capacity, with the solar panels generating up to 30 kilowatts on a system capable of generating more than 43 kilowatts.
This was resolved last December, when PG&E completed the interconnection upgrades RYSE had requested in early 2023. But RYSE still isn’t permitted to store this energy in the battery, which sits in the center’s garden.
When asked about the interconnection delays, Robison referred to her previous comment. “As noted in the statement, we are unable to interconnect this project until the contractor has the required certification,” she said via email.
Project leaders from Sun, Light and Power said in an emailed statement that various PG&E officials gave them conflicting instructions on interconnection and battery permit applications over the past two years, and that the CEC battery certification they had previously obtained became invalid in the interim waiting time.
“By the time this is all squared away, we will be looking at almost three years of this client’s battery project being placed on hold, all due to receiving conflicting instructions from various PG&E Representatives,” said Tara Akins, an engineering administrative assistant and interconnection specialist for the company, via email. She also noted that PG&E had become responsive “for the first time in years” after being contacted by Richmondside.
“We are surrounded by aging systems. When we went to put solar on the building, we were years ahead of PG&E’s capacity to really support it,” said Kimberly Aceves-Iñiguez, co-founder and executive director of RYSE. She was referring to the power grid, which PG&E owns and is responsible for maintaining. “So it has taken much longer than it should.”
Aging grid infrastructure is to blame for the area’s frequent power outages, which occur roughly once a week, Aceves-Iñiguez said.
Site selection can be an important part of the success of a resilience hub, and some experts advocate for establishing hubs in areas with an updated grid to avoid setbacks like the ones RYSE has faced. But, most often, these are not the areas with the greatest need.
“I think that speaks to some level of neglect that environmental justice communities are facing,” said APEN’s Robinson. The group chose to help build the new resilience hub in part because Bissell Avenue “was experiencing brownouts more frequently than other communities.”
And there’s value to building resilience where the community is already gathering. As programs such as Green the Church have proven, solar-powered resilience hubs are only effective if they’re in places people feel comfortable gathering. In RYSE’s case, that has been proven true.
The organization sees resilience as two-fold. It’s the personal resilience built by the young people’s strength and imagination, as well as the physical infrastructure that helps them to thrive.
Aceves-Iñiguez said the staff at RYSE is always asking: “What does it mean to be in a place where you feel loved, where you feel safe? Politically safe, emotionally safe, physically safe, how are we creating that?” Because, she said, “That’s the only way people are going to access resources from us. Otherwise, there’s no trust.”
This has been true for dozens of resilience hubs built statewide in recent years — in churches, community centers and other spaces that were already serving as safe harbors for marginalized communities.
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“Ultimately, the harm is that not enough community resilience hubs and customer-owned renewables will be built.”
— Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar and Storage Association
For K. Baja, co-founder of the Resilience Hub Collaborative, a nationwide organization that supports the transfer of power back to marginalized groups through resilience hubs like the one at RYSE, focusing on the humans more than the hazards is key. “The biggest component of a resilience hub is thinking holistically about these everyday stressors that people are going through,” she said.
And yet utility company delays are a frequent problem. According to Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar and Storage Association (CALSSA), RYSE’s issue is not unusual.
“These delays add years and thousands of dollars in costs. Over 50% of distributed solar/storage [projects] are owned by customers in low-income and middle-class communities,” she said via email.
The delays are prohibited under existing California regulations. The CPUC requires investor-owned utilities to stick to prescribed timelines for interconnection at least 95% of the time. But a CALSSA analysis of self-reported utility data on all solar projects (residential and commercial) found that PG&E has only complied for an average of 63% of the work across a number of key interconnection stages as of last July. For some stages, less than half of the work was completed on time.
And yet the stakes for equipping these centers are high, especially in Richmond. In just the last month alone, the Bay Area Air District (formerly Bay Area Air Quality Management District) issued an air quality advisory for Contra Costa County after the MRC Martinez refinery fire. Atmospheric rivers have caused increased risks of coastal flooding this winter. And CalFire released new fire hazard severity maps that show a slight increase in “very high” fire hazards in Richmond and larger increases in “high” and “very high” fire hazards for Sonoma and San Jose counties.
Reilly and the team are relieved that RYSE’s constituents haven’t faced serious climate catastrophes in recent years, though last summer Richmond did experience several days of extreme heat warnings. If a true disaster had struck, the emergency solar energy backup system wouldn’t have been ready.
Last February, CALSSA joined the California Energy Commission and the CPUC to advocate on behalf of RYSE to pressure PG&E to speed up the interconnection process for its solar panels. But the battery storage is still stalled.
Some find these roadblocks par for the course and part of a larger pattern on the part of PG&E to prioritize profit over community, especially in light of the utility’s recent rate hikes, sizable return profits for its investors, and what critics called a tone-deaf letter to its customers.
“These costs and delays help PG&E preserve its monopoly on electricity,” CALSSA’s Del Chiaro said. She added that the utility has neutralized regulators through “extensive political activity,” referring to the more than $5 million it devoted to political lobbying in 2024.
PG&E does have a grant program intended as seed funding for feasibility assessments, as well as the design and construction of resilience hubs. A total of $400,000 will be awarded this year.
“Ultimately, the harm is that not enough community resilience hubs and customer-owned renewables will be built,” said Del Chiaro. “That leaves Californians exposed to grid outages, PG&E’s record-high rates, and the detrimental health and economic effects of climate change.”
This article was produced with support from the Climate Equity Reporting Project at UC Berkeley Journalism.
