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Ann Arbor details municipal solar, efficiency and EV-charging push to cut city emissions
Summary
City staff described a series of municipal projects — rooftop and ground-mounted solar, battery storage, LED conversions and expanded EV charging — that together aim to reduce facility and fleet emissions and demonstrate progress toward the A2.0 carbon-neutrality goals.
City sustainability staff onstage at a public forum outlined recent and planned projects to reduce emissions from municipal buildings and vehicles, including more than a dozen solar installations already online, new battery storage for resilience, LED streetlight conversions and a federal-funded expansion of public EV chargers.
Simi Bahr, senior analyst for municipal operations in Ann Arbor's Office of Sustainability and Innovations, said the city manages a large portfolio of sites and energy use and has pushed multiple on-site energy projects since issuing a first solar design request for proposals in 2021. "Just last year around 945 megawatt hours" of generation came from city solar arrays, Bahr said, and staff are advancing larger projects including a multi-megawatt rooftop and ground-mount array at the wastewater recovery facility and a roughly 1-megawatt project at the Wheeler Public Works facility, each to include battery storage for peak shaving and outage resilience.
The presentations stressed efficiency gains as well as new generation. Bahr credited a recent change at a wastewater facility that switched a UV disinfection system to a higher-efficiency alternative and estimated energy savings on the order of hundreds of thousands of kilowatt-hours annually, and he noted the city converted more than 4,000 streetlight bulbs to LEDs in 2025.
Steven Janoyan, the city's electric vehicle coordinator, said Ann Arbor has converted a substantial portion of its light fleet to electric and is testing heavier vehicles. "Right now, the city has about 90 electric, city fleet vehicles, 40% of which are those light fleet electrified," Janoyan said. He described pilot projects for refuse trucks and other heavy equipment and said the city has installed about 67 city-owned charging stations so far.
Janoyan discussed a federal Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Grant that will fund roughly 50 additional charging stations and said the city is prioritizing both high-visibility corridor sites and equity-focused locations in neighborhoods identified by the Washtenaw County Opportunity Index. "We're looking at neighborhoods who have been historically left out of the accessibility for charging stations," he said, explaining the city's goal to balance impact with equitable access.
Organizers said more solar and storage installations are in progress, and construction on the larger projects is slated to begin later this year. Staff also highlighted ongoing utility-bill tracking and decarbonization audits to identify further efficiency opportunities.
The forum materials and staff noted that many projects rely on outside funding and grants, and city officials urged continued community support and oversight as the work advances.
