Reactivate and The Obama Foundation partner on community solar to lower energy costs for local communities in Illinois. Sep 01, 2026, 11:00 ET CHICAGO, Sept. 1, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Reactivate, a mission-driven renewable energy developer, and The Obama Foundation today announced a new multi-year partnership under which the Foundation will serve as the "anchor tenant" for community solar projects developed, owned, and operated by Reactivate. This partnership unlocks the financial viability of the solar portfolios, directly enabling low-to-moderate income (LMI) households and local small businesses in Illinois to subscribe to the remaining capacity and realize up to 50% energy cost savings on their utility bills through the Illinois Solar For All program or other regional community solar programs. As an anchor tenant to solar assets, The Obama Foundation secures predictable, lower-cost clean energy to support its sustainability goals and offsets energy costs generated by the Obama Presidential Center. With rising electricity costs across the country, this provides a scalable blueprint for how commercial, industrial, and non-profit organizations can meet ambitious carbon reduction goals while providing economic equity for communities. "By stepping forward as an anchor tenant, The Obama Foundation helps power the Presidential Center with clean energy while actively lowering the barrier to entry for local families and small businesses to cut their energy costs," said Utopia Hill, CEO of Reactivate. "Building a stronger energy future requires leadership and collaboration that prioritizes community wealth creation, while strengthening local resiliency and advancing energy affordability for the communities that need it most." "President Obama set a clear vision: to make sustainability a centerpiece of all we do, and to serve as a model for what is possible," said Valerie Jarrett, CEO of The Obama Foundation. "We believe that taking care of the one planet we have starts with the choices we make right in our own backyard. That is why the Obama Presidential Center not only is sourcing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy, but we are also partnering with a company that will expand access to solar energy to our neighbors." Community solar allows subscribing customers to realize the financial benefits of clean energy without requiring property ownership or the upfront capital costs associated with traditional rooftop solar installations. For renters, working-class households, and local small businesses, community solar represents one of the few zero-upfront-cost mechanisms available to combat volatile energy pricing while supporting regional grid decarbonization. "It is an honor to partner with an organization like The Obama Foundation whose commitment to strengthening communities closely aligns with our own," said Tuba Avcisert, SVP of Origination and Contracting at Reactivate. "Their trust in Reactivate to serve the Obama Center's energy needs reflect a shared belief that clean energy projects should create lasting, meaningful benefits for the local communities they serve. About Reactivate Reactivate is a mission-driven organization that develops, owns, and operates renewable energy solutions that are designed to improve quality of life for communities, with a focus on meaningful benefits for working-class people across the country. Focus areas include community solar, small utility-scale solar, energy storage and EV charging projects. By delivering economic development and energy resiliency with renewable energy solutions, Reactivate provides energy cost savings, job opportunities, workforce training and opportunities for businesses, while creating positive social and environmental impact. About The Obama Foundation The Obama Foundation is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with a mission to inspire, empower, and connect people to change their world. That mission begins on the South Side of Chicago, where the Foundation is building the Obama Presidential Center. But that approach extends to all our work, whether it's holding leadership training sessions in communities throughout the U.S., bringing local leaders together in countries around the world, working to support the global education of girls, or ensuring young men of color have pathways to opportunity. From every corner of the globe, our program participants are working together to address some of the biggest challenges of our time - from renewing our democratic institutions, protecting LGBTQ+ rights, fighting climate change, and so much more. SOURCE Reactivate

Scalable calibrates projection at Obama Presidential Center. Camera-based auto-alignment and custom multi-projector workflows keep a four-storey Power of Words canvas and 360° circular projection seamlessly blended during continuous operation. Located on Chicago's South Side, the Obama Presidential Center is a 19.3-acre campus that serves as a civic and cultural space, including a four-floor museum, program rooms, a public library branch, an athletic centre, an auditorium, and community gathering spaces. At the centre of the museum experience are large-scale immersive media installations designed to support storytelling throughout the facility. The museum explores themes of democracy, civic engagement and social change through interactive exhibits, archival materials and multimedia environments throughout the building. Among the museum's most technically demanding installations are Power of Words, a four-storey projection experience extending through the museum atrium, and a 360-degree circular projection environment featuring custom digital artwork developed in collaboration with a French artist. Power of Words spans approximately 85 feet (26 metres) vertically across four museum floors, allowing visitors to view the installation from multiple balcony levels throughout the atrium. The projection system consists of seven projectors positioned across multiple floors, including four landscape-oriented projectors covering the primary wall surface and three portrait-oriented projectors covering an adjacent wall. The second installation uses eight projectors arranged around a circular projection ring to create a continuous immersive display. The scale and complexity of the installations created significant operational challenges for the museum team. The large-format multi-projector systems require consistent alignment and calibration to maintain a seamless image, particularly in public environments like the Obama Presidential Center, which are subject to vibration, HVAC activity, temperature fluctuations and ongoing visitor traffic. In the case of Power of Words, the projection surface itself spans four storeys and is integrated directly into the building structure, introducing subtle shifts in geometry and screen tension over time. "We needed a system that would allow us to automate alignment and maintain image quality without requiring constant manual intervention," said Paul Horst, senior manager of exhibition AV systems for the Obama Presidential Center. Without automated calibration, maintaining systems of this scale often requires ongoing involvement from highly specialised projection technicians who can manually adjust geometry, warping and edge blending. In museum environments that operate daily with limited on-site technical staffing, those workflows can become difficult to sustain in the long term. To address those challenges, The Obama Foundation selected Scalable Display Technologies, whose software enables multiple projectors to operate as a single seamless display. Using camera-based calibration, the software automatically aligns geometry, and blends edges across projection surfaces of varying shapes and scales. What traditionally required days of manual alignment by specialised technicians can instead be completed through automated recalibration workflows. The ability to rapidly recalibrate large projection environments was particularly important for a museum installation that operated continuously without dedicated projection specialists onsite. Projection systems naturally drift over time due to environmental conditions, vibration, projector maintenance and changes in screen geometry. Scalable's software allows operators to restore alignment through automated recalibration rather than relying on time-intensive manual adjustments or external service calls. "We've been working with Scalable on batch files to run calibration from the command line, automatically generate MPCDI files, copy those files into the media server and trigger the media server to load updated calibration data," explained Horst. The automated workflow also coordinates environmental controls during recalibration, including projector warm-up periods and temporary lighting adjustments. Once recalibration is initiated, the system generates updated alignment datasets that can be deployed without extensive manual correction. "The recalibration process inside Scalable's software has worked extremely well," said Horst. "It's very helpful to warm up the projectors, run recalibration and achieve a clean updated alignment without extensive manual work." Scalable's projection technology is widely used in simulation, museum and immersive entertainment environments where image consistency and reliability are critical. The same automated calibration workflows used in defence and aerospace simulation systems are also deployed in projection mapping installations, themed entertainment environments and large-scale immersive exhibits where multiple projectors must behave as a single unified image. The architectural design of the atrium installation also introduced unique geometric challenges. Because of balcony placement and limited projector mounting positions, the system required projection across two intersecting wall planes positioned at nearly 90° angles. Several projectors were forced to operate at extreme projection angles where image spillover between adjacent surfaces became difficult to manage. To accommodate these conditions, Scalable collaborated with The Obama Foundation to develop a software feature called Projector Groups. The feature allows separate warp-and-blend operations across independent projection surfaces while maintaining controlled edge transitions between content regions. Horst explained, "That allowed independent warp and blend operations on each wall with a defined hard-edge seam between content regions." Prior to full deployment, The Obama Foundation developed both a full-scale projection mock-up and a miniature physical model replicating the final projector configuration. The process allowed the project team and Scalable engineers to test geometry, camera placement, media playback and calibration behaviour before installation inside the museum. "By the time we entered the building installation phase, we already felt confident the system would work," said Horst. In addition to the technical capabilities of the software, Horst cited Scalable's engineering support and responsiveness as a major factor throughout the project. "One of the biggest factors, honestly, wasn't technical - it was customer service," he said. "They've been very active throughout the process, added entirely new software features to solve challenges unique to our project and responded quickly whenever issues came up." According to Horst, the system's stability allowed exhibit designers and media producers to focus on refining content presentation rather than resolving projection issues during deployment. "The installation looks extremely clean," Horst said. "Honestly, one of the best outcomes is that nobody comments on the projection itself, which is exactly what you want. It simply looks the way it's supposed to look."