Solar+Storage for Community Health Centers: CrescentCare Case Study

CrescentCare Community Health Center is one of the largest health centers in New Orleans, serving primarily low-income and uninsured individuals. During Hurricane Ida in 2021, failure of the facility’s diesel generators resulted in over $250,000 in losses due to facility closure and spoilage of temperature regulated, cold storage-dependent vaccines and medications. To better support their community in the event of an outage, CrescentCare replaced their diesel generators with solar paired with battery storage (solar+storage), as well as a natural gas generator. The system was designed to power the entire facility, including vaccine storage, pharmacy, IT infrastructure, and patient care areas. This Clean Energy Group webinar will focus on CrescentCare’s experience developing solar+storage, highlighting project finances, challenges, and benefits.  

Guest speakers will also provide an overview of the Solar+Storage Microgrids for Rural Community Health Centers Project, a U.S. Department of Energy-funded effort focused on building the energy preparedness of rural community health centers in the Southeast. Applications are currently open for this program, which provides no-cost technical assistance and approximately 70% in grants to develop and install a solar+storage system. 

Speakers include Marriele Mango, Senior Project Director at Clean Energy Group; Jessica Hinshaw, Environmental Health Director at the National Association of Community Health Centers; Reginald Vicks, Chief Operations Officer at CrescentCare Community Health Center Sara Rossi, Managing Director of Direct Relief’s Health Resiliency Fund; and  Joshua Cox, Chief Executive Office of Community Power South and partner with broad-based coalition Together New Orleans. 

This webinar is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) through the Energy Improvements in Rural or Remote Areas (ERA) program under award number DE-CD0000071.  

OCED was established to accelerate clean energy technologies and fill a critical innovation gap on the path to achieving our nation’s climate goals of net zero emissions by 2050. OCED’s mission is to deliver clean energy demonstration projects at scale in partnership with the private sector to accelerate deployment, market adoption, and the equitable transition to a decarbonized energy system. Visit energy.gov/oced to learn more. The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Energy or the United States Government.