In Warren County, Kentucky, the school district saved more than $2 million in utility costs since retrofitting five schools with solar panels and introducing other energy efficiencies. In Jamestown, Rhode Island, installing solar panels at two schools is saving the district more than $60,000 per year. After the school district in Boulder Valley, Colorado, retrofitted a middle school, energy costs dropped by approximately $10,000 annually. 

Those examples are from a new report commissioned by the Building Power Resource Center, a group that supports climate action. While investing in green buildings is good for the environment, the report makes the case that it’s also good financially, freeing up money schools can use for teachers, books and other needs. 

And the report says that even though the Trump administration cut many of the federal programs incentivizing schools to invest in greener buildings and vehicles, there are still places to turn for help with up-front capital on clean energy projects — namely state programs. Still, because of the shifting politics, the projects face longer odds getting off the ground than a few years ago.

“School districts all around the country are looking for ways to save money, and this seems like a pretty good strategy for them to be looking at,” said David R. Eichenthal, the study author and a former Biden administration official who now serves as a visiting research scholar at the City University of New York’s Center for Urban Research. “I used to be a local government finance officer, and there are few phrases that are more music to one’s ears than ‘recurring operating savings.’”

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For Putnam Valley Central School District, about 50 miles north of Manhattan, those sorts of savings have been accumulating for several decades. Back in 1998, the district converted a middle school from inefficient, electric baseboard heating to geothermal energy, a renewable resource that taps heat from the Earth’s crust.  

The project was financed through what’s known as an energy performance contract: The district received a bond to cover up-front costs of geothermal construction, which it repaid through the savings generated from swapping the less-efficient energy source for a more-efficient one, said David Spittal, the district’s director of operations and transportation. 

In 2000, the district built a new high school that was entirely reliant on geothermal, turning to a pot of state money — building aid for school capital improvement projects — to help cover the up-front costs. When Spittal joined in 2017, the district took on another, smaller decarbonization project at the elementary school, again using an energy performance contract. Then last year, voters approved a bond to convert the elementary school entirely to geothermal, and state building aid will pick up some of the costs. 

In the report, Eichenthal calculated that geothermal at the middle school has saved the district roughly $1.5 million in energy costs. Spittal estimates that the projected savings of all the district’s green energy investments will be significantly higher: roughly $18 million between 2019 and 2039.

“If we hadn’t done this, we would have been in trouble,” said Spittal. “We would either have to raise taxes or lose teachers and raise class sizes.” 

The federal retreat from climate action has complicated plans to fund such projects: New York State building aid reduced Putnam Valley’s up-front costs for the latest geothermal project by two-thirds, but they would have been next to nothing if the district had tapped into clean energy tax credits created by the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, Spittal said. The school district chose not to discuss that option with voters, though, because of the tax credits’ uncertain future; last year, Congress and the Trump administration rolled back several of them (though credits for geothermal remain largely intact.)

Still, state programs to help school districts decarbonize continue to exist, in both red and blue states. New York, Maryland and Massachusetts have grant programs for cleaner, green schools. In Texas, the LoanSTAR Revolving Loan Program finances clean energy projects on buildings supported by the state, including school districts; the loans are repaid with cost savings from the projects. Minnesota and Pennsylvania have programs to help schools adopt solar, Ohio has one for energy efficiency, and Colorado provides grants for geothermal energy, among other examples. 

Related: Students, schools race to save clean energy projects in face of Trump deadline

West Virginia is one of more than two dozen states to green-light power purchase agreements, which typically allow school districts and other tax-exempt organizations to lend their space for solar projects. The Wayne County school district worked with Solar Holler, a solar energy company, to build solar panels on 15 of its schools. The project is expected to save the school district about $200,000 in annual energy costs, said Todd Alexander, the district’s superintendent.  

While that’s not a huge savings for a district the size of Wayne County, the state’s 12th-largest, it still amounts to the salaries of about two teachers, Alexander said. And the project cost nothing for the district because all the expenses were borne by Solar Holler, including through federal incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act and a private sector arrangement known as a renewable energy certificate. Under the arrangement, companies seeking to meet climate decarbonization goals were matched by the business Ever.green to help pick up some of the costs of the Solar Holler project.

“It was kind of a no-brainer,” Alexander said.    

Yet even with the clear-cut financial savings, there was political blowback. State Sen. Craig Hart, who represents part of Wayne County, introduced a bill to limit power purchase agreements, arguing that they undercut coal and politicized schools. “I don’t think a school is a good place to make a political statement about your utilities and whatnot,” he said in a committee hearing, according to the news organization Mountain State Spotlight. Lawmakers dropped the bill, but new efforts to limit wind and solar have popped up in the state Legislature this year. 

In spite of the obstacles, Dan Conant, founder and chief executive officer of Solar Holler, said that spiraling electricity prices are fueling interest in solar. “We’re going to be okay without the [federal] incentives,” he said. “Solar is just flat-out cheaper than what folks are getting from the utility grid.”

Eichenthal, the report author, said he hopes that as districts get better about tracking their savings and sharing those stories, green investments will continue to catch on. 

“There are dollars that are available for school districts that want to do this. There’s a long history of state involvement in this area,” he said. “And there are now a series of solid case studies where we no longer just have to say, ‘Well, we think you’re going to save money.’ We can say, ‘Here are the dollars and cents.’”

Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.

This story about green schoolswas produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s climate change newsletter.

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