Solar Power for Faria Farms in Tipton, CA
– Mike Faria
About the Project
Background
With thousands of acres and businesses that range from dairy farming to nut growing, financial responsibility and environmental sustainability are both priorities for family-owned Faria Farms.
“My brother and my cousins are the second generations of leadership for our businesses, and we are planning for future generations to come after us,” said co-owner Mike Faria. “Environmental responsibility is not ‘nice-to-have.’ It’s a business and family imperative. At the same time, everything has to make business sense.”
Why Solar?
“In agriculture, you’re always thinking about how to be sustainable,” Mike said. “We started thinking about solar when our electricity bills started to rise dramatically. We want to be here tomorrow.”
“With solar energy, we are able to achieve economic and environmental sustainability at the same time,” Mike said. “We are able to reduce our operating costs and make a big dent in our carbon footprint.”
Headquartered in Tipton, California, Faria has installed a total of 2 MW of electricity–enough to power more than 300 homes. The system delivers power across multiple contiguous properties, taking advantage of California’s Net Metering Aggregation to bundle power for 27 metered facilities, from remote pumps to large buildings.
Why Coldwell Energy?
Faria Farms chose Coldwell Energy to design and build their solar energy system. “Coldwell shared our commitment to the environmental and financial concerns,” Mike said. “They went above and beyond what we expected, starting with spending hours evaluating our utility bills before we even selected them for the project.”
“When they ran the numbers for us, we thought it might be too good to be true,” Mike said. “We took their calculations to our accountant who said, ‘this is for real.’”
“What stood out the most was the quality of Coldwell’s installations,” Mike said. “We visited other projects they had designed and built, and you can immediately see the difference. They use custom protected wire clips instead of zip-ties, for example. You could see that their systems are built to perform and to last.”
Ongoing Partnership
With 27 meters and different types of facilities using electricity at multiple billing rates, managing the billing for the company was a major challenge. “Coldwell has a team of people that have worked for utilities and understand the billing system perfectly,” Mike said. “It is extremely complicated and they made it easy for us. They took care of everything.”
The relationship didn’t end with the completion of the construction of the system. Coldwell provides a standard 10 year warranty, plus maintenance and system monitoring for the life of the system. “We got a call from one of their technicians telling us we had a broken panel,” Mike said. “Sure enough, something had fallen on a panel and they came out and replaced it right away. They’re really watching out for us.”