Commercial Project

Solar Energy for La Clinica Fruitvale Village in Oakland, CA

La Clinica was looking to reduce their energy costs and carbon emissions with clean energy.

Project Details

Objectives

La Clinica was looking to reduce their energy costs and carbon emissions with clean energy. First they needed a cost effective solution to fix their leaky roof. They needed a cost effective solution that would make financial sense.

About the Client

La Clínica was born of the efforts put forth by a group of UC Berkeley students in 1971, and has been providing health care services to the communities of the East Bay ever since. The aforementioned students, aware of the gap in health care for lower-income populations, held a conviction: that every person deserves access to high-quality, culturally appropriate health care, regardless of their ability to pay. Influenced by the philosophies of Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez, these students and several community members worked feverishly to create a community-based clinic. They took action and established a storefront clinic in East Oakland. They called it, ‘La Clínica de La Raza.La Clínica has seen great expansion over the years, and now has sites in three different counties. In 2018 alone, La Clínica served over 90,000 patients

Challenges

La Clinica’s building is a high rise and the roof is made of concrete post tension construction. This type of roof system is complicated, because it cannot be penetrated just anywhere, due to the internal roof cabling system. If the roof cabling system is compromised then the structural integrity of the roof is as well. The height of the building was a challenge to get materials and equipment loaded on the roof.

Simmitri’s Solution

Before the solar install Simmitri installed a 20 year silicone cool roof system. This not only provides waterproofing, but it also serves as an energy efficiency measure. We added granules to the coating to give LA Clinica’s future maintenance technicians more grip when they walk on the coating during wet conditions. This coating solution was less than half the cost of a traditional 20 year roof. We used a ballasted racking system to minimize roof penetrations.

To avoid hitting the cables in the concrete, we used a concrete scanner system that uses Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) technology. These tools send radar waves into the concrete and analyze the reflections to reveal the location and type of hidden objects, including cables.