Did You Know? Solar Powers LEED-Platinum Gallagher Hall

Sunshine provides a boost of renewable energy to power the Graduate School of Management’s campus home, Maurice J. Gallagher, Jr. Hall, and the adjoining UC Davis Conference Center, which pushed the ecofriendly buildings into the elite class of green construction.

The addition of a 102-kilowatt photovoltaic solar array atop the two buildings when they opened in 2009 qualified the $34 million project for Platinum certification two years later from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design (LEED) program, the national benchmark for the design, construction and operations of high-performance green buildings.

Gallagher Hall became the first business school building in California to earn the Platinum seal of environmental sustainability.

UC Davis signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with Main Street Power Company of Colorado to install and operate the 144,000 kilowatt/hour solar system, according to Pablo Orozco, who was then-assistant director of engineering for project management at UC Davis.

“This is localized power that is expected to produce about 15–20 percent of the building need,” Orozco explained at the time of installation. “We anticipate no opportunities to export this power elsewhere to campus because there will always be a base load in the building bigger than the solar power the system produces.”

The solar arrays contributed three additional points toward the Gallagher Hall/Conference Center LEED submission, pushing it past the 52-point threshold for a Platinum rating, according to Strachan Forgan, a principal at Sasaki of San Francisco, the lead architects on the project