I am standing in front of the historic Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C., and owner Chip Ellis is showing me the latest monthly electric bill he received for the 115-year-old building – $23,604.88 (see picture below).
When the Howard opened its doors in 1910, it was the first theater in the United States showcasing African American performers for African American audiences – called by some “the Black Carnegie Hall.” Duke Ellington and his band played here in the 1930s, as did jazz singers Ella Fitzgerald and Billy Eckstine, both in their teens at the time. In 1962, the Supremes, with a then-unknown lead singer named Diana Ross, played their first concert outside their hometown of Detroit.
These days, the theater hosts a multicultural mix of rap, R&B and pop acts. But we are here, on a sunny September morning, for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate some major building upgrades – a new, super efficient HVAC system, along with solar panels and battery storage – which together could cut the Howard’s utility bills more than $82,000 per year. (See photo above.)
“The Howard Theatre consumes over $250,000 in utility costs annually, with electricity being $200,000 of that cost,” Ellis said during his remarks before the ribbon cutting. “This level of expenditure … and other expenses for a theater can be the difference between a profitable year, a break-even year and a year of loss for the operation.”
Chip Ellis with his $23,604.88 electric bill
Ellis anticipates utility bill savings of 30% to 40% going forward, but “if and only if our original electricity costs from our local provider do not increase by the same rate.”
Lifetime savings for the upgrades are estimated at 487.4 MWh and just under $2 million.
But getting to those savings has been complicated. The project penciled out thanks to a mix of funding – a $775,000 loan from the DC Green Bank, a $700,500 grant from the National Park Service’s African American Civil Rights program and more than $36,500 in rebates from the DC Sustainable Energy Utility.
A local installer, Uprise Solar, worked on the solar and storage project, which ran into significant roadblocks – and a six-month delay – with the local utility, Pepco, according to Uprise CEO Chris Sewell.
“Pepco wouldn’t allow the building to export” power from the 106-kilowatt array that Uprise originally planned for its roof, mainly due to the utility’s aging poles and wires in the Shaw neighborhood where the Howard is located, Sewell told me before the ribbon cutting.
A $120,000 redesign added storage to the project to limit power exports to the system. Three racks of batteries – a total of 40 kW, with three hours of duration – now sit in a corner of the kitchen in the theater’s basement. Some final wiring has to be completed before the system can be inspected and cleared to go online, Sewell said.
I tried to set up an interview with Pepco to ask some basic questions about the Howard project and the state of the utility’s distribution system in D.C.’s older, historically African American neighborhoods, but was given a statement instead.
“For the [Howard’s] solar connection to function safely and be reliable, upgrades were required to the local energy grid, including enhancements to support backward power flow from the distributed solar system into the network. These upgrades were carefully planned in coordination with the customer to help ensure continued reliability for the theater and surrounding community.”
Ellis said the six-month delay has meant six months of lost savings for the theater. The final agreement also limits the amount of electricity the Howard’s solar panels can export to the grid to 24 kW at any one time, a cap that could result in wasted power, Sewell said.
Funding — before Trump
Timing was critical for the Howard project. In late 2023, the theater’s old HVAC system was clearly on its last legs, and Ellis started exploring what a more efficient replacement, including solar, would involve.
Boland, a local HVAC contractor with deep roots in the D.C. region, was tapped to design a new HVAC system that would cut the theater’s electric bills without requiring any major redesigns to the building itself. New equipment had to fit exactly into the existing space, said Jimmy Murray, an account executive at Boland.
“That's what really made that a very unique project,” Murray said during a recent phone interview. “We were very limited with the stuff that we could do because of the historic nature of the building, and obviously we wouldn't want to run anything on the outside of it, change any of the insides or the aesthetics.”
The new system also includes energy management software that allows Boland to monitor and optimize operation of the HVAC across the Howard’s performance, office and other spaces, cutting heating and cooling costs by 30% to 40%, he said.
“We have an optimization strategy in there that is designed … to look at the space temperature and decide how far ahead of an event it has to turn the air conditioning on to meet its set point,” he said.
Lining up the funding for the new systems took place in 2024, prior to the election that brought Donald Trump back to the White House for a second term and the subsequent rollback of federal funding for both clean energy and diversity projects.
Ellis partnered with the DC Preservation League on the NPS grant, which Executive Director Rebecca Miller said was awarded in June of 2024. By the time the ribbon was cut, the federal dollars were all safely spent.
The NPS issued an announcement for a 2025 funding round for the African American Civil Rights grant program in January, prior to Trump’s inauguration, Miller said.
But the program is now on hold as part of a “review for compliance with new Executive Orders,” according to an email from the NPS. Given Trump’s furious efforts to whitewash anything to do with African American history, the grant program likely will not be available for future projects like the Howard.
Similarly, Trump’s presence – and efforts to disrupt or roll back D.C. home rule – provided an ominous note to the Howard ribbon cutting, which took place as Mayor Muriel Bowser was being grilled by the House Oversight Committee on the city’s record on crime and diversity.
Speaking at the Howard ribbon-cutting, D.C. Councilmember Charles Allen warned that the city’s environmental and clean energy programs – like the Green Bank and DCSEU – would also be at risk in a Trump or congressional takeover. Both programs receive dollars from the D.C.’s Sustainable Energy Trust Fund, which is raised from small surcharges on residents’ electric and gas bills.
“We’ve got folks who try to make the words ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ [sound] as if they’re somehow dirty words,” Allen said. “When we make these types of investments, we’re not only doing something that is better for the climate, better for our community, but we actually are making just common sense improvements for our city.”
Historic buildings, climate leaders
Over its 115-year history, the Howard has faced ongoing challenges. Following the 1929 stock market crash, it was briefly converted into a church, reopening as a theater in 1931. Audiences dwindled following the 1968 riots in D.C., triggered by the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and the theater closed in 1970.
Local efforts to preserve the theater as a hub for African American art and culture began with the formation of the Howard Theatre Foundation in 1973 and the building’s designation as a national historic landmark in ‘74. It reopened in 1975, closed again in 1980 and remained closed for 32 years. Led by Chip Ellis, Ellis Development acquired the building in 2006, and after major renovations, the Howard reopened in 2012.
The green upgrades to the building mark yet another stage of its storied history, said Councilmember Brianna Nadeau.
“These new solar panels and energy upgrades aren’t just about saving on utility bills,” she said. “They’re about showing that our historic buildings can also be climate leaders. We’re preserving the District’s history and planning for the future all at once.”
“Anyone who says historic preservation stands in the way of sustainability, you’re dead wrong,” Miller of the DC Preservation League added. Office buildings downtown and rowhouses in the city’s historic neighborhoods offer a wealth of flat roofs for solar installations.
“We had more than 500 solar permits go through the [city’s] Historic Preservation Office last year alone,” she said. Citing a number of studies, Miller also noted that green upgrades to historic buildings may use less energy and have a lower environmental impact than the construction of new net-zero buildings.
Faced with Trump’s broken campaign promise to quickly slash utility bills in half, the administration is trying to frame clean tech as the cause of electric bills now rising at twice the rate of inflation – and eating away at Ellis’s potential savings at the Howard.
In August, the Department of Justice issued a call for citizens to report state policies that could impede national economic growth and interstate commerce. While the DOJ’s request for information does not specifically mention state laws and programs promoting clean energy, E&E News reported that the 251 comments received thus far included complaints about state bans on natural gas appliances in new construction.
The Howard Theatre and its shiny new solar panels sit two miles from the White House, defying Trump’s war on clean energy and diversity with D.C.’s determination to show how the two are tightly linked and critical tools for the environment, equity and affordability for all its residents.