This past week I heard the details (at Napa Green's Napa Rise climate event) about a new microgrid installation at Domaine Carneros, which I am writing about for Grape and Wine magazine's next issue. (Stay tuned. I will publish a link here when the story is published.)
But the Domaine Carneros adventures reminded me of the unpublished version of my previous October story on microgrids. The published version of the story appeared Oct. 13, 2022 in The Guardian, where it was heavily edited from the original concept as a "local" story to one with broader geographical representation about solar powered healthcare microgrids.
The original story I pitched–and the assignment from The New Lede and The Guardian–was (solely) to profile the Hollister clinic's microgrid–so here is THAT story.
This version covers much more of the clinic's unique culture and the clinic's ongoing green direction and drive. It also shows that the biggest benefits of the solar conversion became much more apparent after Covid hit. (The Covid part of the story was left out in the The Guardian version.) I loved this article, and I loved the people and clinic in it, so I am offering it here (with permission from the original commissioning editor at The New Lede, thank you very much) in the hopes that you, the audience, will enjoy it. Solar Powered Microgrid Provides Healthcare System Resilience for California Farmworkers
When healthcare clinic CEO Rosa Vivian Fernandez (of the San Benito Health Foundation) traveled from central California to visit her family in Puerto Rico, in 2017, she was shocked to see how Hurricane Maria had devastated not just the buildings, but the healthcare system as well.
With the electrical grid down, and no diesel available for backup generators, the Category 5 storm’s impact on the grid wiped out healthcare services. “People died,” she said.
While resources came to the east side of the island faster, Fernandez was the first to get to the west side of the island where her family is from, where her sister works in healthcare and where critical help was delayed. “I got there three weeks out, before the government got to the clinics,” she said.
“All the healthcare centers–the ones that did not get flooded or destroyed by the storm–went down,” she said. Backup diesel generators failed. Electronic payment systems could not function. “The clinics just couldn't find diesel. Even if they had the cash, they couldn't find it,” she said.
When the clinics did have power, it was so intermittent that they weren't able to keep medical supplies, she reported. “So some of them lost all medical supplies that were vulnerable, particularly vaccines, and then they were not able to keep medical supplies because of the power issue,” she said.
“When you look at the fact that they just didn't have these resources at a critical time, when there was an even greater risk of disease, that was really sad. In some cases, there was no insulin. People died.”
Back home in Hollister, the local clinic she runs faces many natural and climate change related risks–from earthquakes to electrical outages from heat waves that take down the utility grid.
Just 43 miles south of San Jose, this farming and ranching community sits on the Calaveras fault, a branch of the more famous San Andreas fault. The last major earthquake on the Calaveras was the Morgan Hill event, a 6.2 on the Richter scale, which struck in 1984. The San Benito County region is facing huge changes, as housing shortages caused by Silicon Valley commuters moving have raised home prices to as $800,000 and created massive traffic congestion.
In the county’s largest town, Hollister, the population has doubled since 1990, from 19,212 to 41,000 in 2020. Nearly 70 percent are Mexican and Mexican-American farmworkers, paid $20-25,000 a year to work in the fields of apricots, cherries, spinach and organic salad greens.
When Fernandez returned home from Puerto Rico, she told her San Benito Health Foundation board about her Hurricane Maria experiences.
“The board was adamant that our clinic would not face the same vulnerabilities,” she said. Founded by farmworkers in 1975, the facility serves more than 9,000 patients.
The workers, who are typically paid $20-25,000 a year, are essential to the food system. Around Hollister, they harvest mainly apricots, cherries, spinach and organic salad greens.
The clinic has a unique culture.
It’s a population that uses Whatsapp to communicate with relatives in Mexico, so the clinic uses Whatsapp for healthcare messaging. “We text them but they don't read their text. They just see that something from the clinic came through, and they call us and say, ‘well, we got a text from you,” says Fernandez.
When new mothers go to get a nursing bra, they get to pick one out from pullout drawers as sweetly arranged as at a Victoria’s Secret display.
When kids go for dental care, they sit in one of eight chairs in an open environment (while their parents wait outside) with other kids, where they can see others their age who are not freaked out about seeing the dentist.
The board did not want to see their special culture, clinic and healthcare services threatened if they did not take action.
Microgrid Power
Located across the street from the Dollar General store on Hollister’s main road, the clinic would soon become a shining example for healthcare facilities across the country as the first healthcare clinic in California to have its own solar powered microgrid.
The San Benito Health Foundation’s grid covers roughly100 percent of the clinic’s needs and was completed in February 2019, a month before Covid hit.
After meeting at a Rotary event, the clinic partnered with the Romero Institute’s Let’s Green California group and Mynt Systems, a solar installer in Santa Cruz, to realize their vision of energy independence. The three worked together to renovate the facility, spending $1.6 million to refresh the structure and reduce power consumption by changing lighting, heating and cooling systems and beefing up the roof to hold the new solar panels.
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San Benito Health Foundation CEO Rosa Vivian Fernandez
with battery that stores the clinic's solar power |
The $1.7 million solar powered microgrid stores energy in a large battery, smaller than a shipping container, that sits unobtrusively in the parking lot. If the sun does not shine, the battery has the capacity to store power for up to 10 days and is backed up by a diesel generator.
They also added two electric car charging stations which are available to employees and the community.
Their microgrid offsets 3.6 million pounds of coal annually, according to Mynt, and lowers costs, making more funds available for care. Their monthly power bills went from $44,000 a month to $4,000 a month, and, after a four year delay–a delay the clinic says was due to the utility company’s bureaucratic inefficiencies–they received a rebate from PG&E for $400,000 this year.
In addition, PG&E prices have risen 15 percent this year with many future increases on the horizon from the vast undergrounding project the giant utility has planned.
Fernandez says the microgrid is not a cost saving investment overall, but is mission critical.
When the pandemic hit, the clinic’s reliance on energy became even more dire.
“We have very large refrigerators and freezers that are for vaccines, and they have to be at a constant temperature and running all the time” she said, “so there's no way to reduce power to them."
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Fernandez and a staff physician stand next to the refrigerated storage
for Covid vaccines and other medications |
"We're on electronic health records which requires all computers in the building to be on during PG&E’s peak usage time (4 to 9 pm) because, anywhere in the building, we're accessing patient care items that are very important. In a healthcare facility, we cannot reduce consumption–if anything, we need to augment consumption during those peak hours.”
During the pandemic, the clinic treated hundreds of patients and administered doses of the Covid vaccines. It was also among the first to offer drive through vaccinations. Families shared stories about relatives who died because they did not get the vaccine. In response to a southern California bishop who was making anti-vaccine statements, Fernandez quoted the Pope’s advice to get the vaccine.
Even the Jehovah’s Witnesses came to the clinic for vaccinations. “They left messages for our staff, thanking them for their efforts,” Fernandez said.
A Literal Lifeline
Last week, when record setting heat–hitting an all time high of 109 degrees Fahrenheit in San Jose– brought down PG&E’s grid in some areas, San Jose’s Santa Clara Hospital had power blackouts. Its backup generator failed. Three buildings lost electricity. The hospital canceled elective surgeries. Without power, medical pumps, monitors and ventilators were unable to function. The hospital told local ambulances to route incoming emergency care patients to other area hospitals. A surgeon told a local reporter that the situation was “very dangerous.”
In comparison, San Benito’s clinic administrators and staff did not panic at all when the utility company’s Flex Alerts, autogenerated cell phone texts urging consumers to reduce power use as energy use peaked, came and went.
Their community journey to a new electric powered world is just beginning.
The clinic has already installed a model kitchen in its community room, with an induction cooktop stove, and is launching cooking classes on how to use it.
In the past, the board was divided over buying a Prius for Fernandez, but now that one of the more conservative board members, who previously opposed a Prius purchase, works at an electric tractor company, there is support for an EV.
The clinic has purchased a new EV cargo van to be used as a mobile clinic, and board members have visited manufacturing sites that demonstrate the new vehicles which police units in southern California are now buying.
Struggling to Find Housing and People Power
There are still risks ahead.
Staffing shortages led to bringing in six Mexican physicians, some of whom are faculty at the well regarded Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), because the clinic has found it nearly impossible to get bilingual American staff willing to work for nonprofit wages. When they are able to find qualified candidates, they often cannot find housing for them.
The nonprofit has now purchased land in historic San Juan Batista (population: 2,000), “City of History”–famous for its 1812 adobe mission and fort–where Rosa Vivien and the board plan to build a teaching clinic with housing for faculty, staff and students.
The location is seven miles away from Hollister, but conveniently located next to a major freeway, so it would enable the clinic to treat more area patients and train and house much needed bilingual staff.
But the clinic must negotiate a plan that will satisfy current opposition from local residents, historic preservationists and the local planning commission.
The clinic leadership is already planning for a microgrid to run the new, proposed facility, and looking into electric bikes for local transportation.
