The Dixon Public School Board is looking into contracting with a solar vendor to decrease its long-term energy costs.

The district previously moved forward with a solar project in late 2022 with Chicago-based energy company Econergy that estimated a potential district savings of almost $2 million over 25 years. The board voted to terminate those contracts in April 2025 based on a lack of progress on the project, but board members said they’d still like to pursue solar options.

At the board’s meeting Wednesday, Dixon Public Schools Business Manager Marc Campbell said he’s found a solar vendor with “a likely option for us to move forward with.”

A representative with the vendor will make a presentation and answer questions from board members at the next meeting, at 6 p.m. Nov. 19, at 1335 Franklin Grove Road in Dixon. Board meetings can also be viewed on the district’s YouTube channel and are typically uploaded the day after the meeting.

Campbell said the vendor is offering two different models – one for seven years and the other for 15.

The seven-year model offers “some nice benefits,” he said. It gives the district the ability to purchase the system at a fair market value of about $230,000, with a zero-interest loan to pay that out over 10 years. It also sets the energy rate at 0.036 cents per kilowatt, which is set for the length of the Power Purchase Agreement with the vendor, Campbell said.

A PPA is a contract in which a company installs and maintains a solar panel system on the other party’s property at little to no upfront cost. The other party in the contract – in this case, the district – agrees to buy the electricity generated by the system at a predetermined rate for a set period of time.

Campbell said the vendor predicts it would begin construction around October 2026 “should we choose to go forward with them.”

The vendor already has provided the district with a drafted PPA, but “I do believe that it still needs a lot of work with our attorneys,” Campbell said. The goal is to have that finalized and up for approval by the board at the November meeting.

“Given the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ and some of the stipulations [of it] we do have to act quickly on this,” Campbell said.

President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” was signed into law in July. It includes large tax cuts in multiple areas along with shifting the federal focus from clean energy to expanding domestic oil and gas production, according to whitehouse.gov.

That bill “has created some very specific deadlines” for incentives that would be beneficial to solar vendors, which is why the board has to move fast because “without those incentives” the project would “kind of be void,” Campbell said.

However, “not moving forward with this one we would be delaying any type of future solar action for years” because the solar industry will undergo a kind of reset, Campbell said.

“I think from our discussion last time [in April] there was enough interest to” move forward with this, Board President Linda Wegner said.

“For me, the big driver is going to be your [Campbell’s] level of comfort with this,” Board member Jon Wadsworth said.

Campbell said that “as an overall perspective, I would say that the vendor has been very attentive. … We’re moving forward from a very, very honest perspective of where we’re at and what our needs are and what we hope to accomplish with this."

“We will continue to move the information forward and see where we end up,” Campbell said.