Town in Maine Chooses Solar Power Over Transmission Upgrade

solar.coolerplanet.com
August 17, 2009

In October of 2008, The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted a petition from Central Maine Power Co. (CMP) to build a $1.4 billion transmission project in the state.

The project, which would add 245 miles of new 345-kilovolt transmission line (including a line from Orrington to Portsmouth, N.H.) and 74 miles of new 115-kilovolt transmission line, as well as rebuild 10 miles of 345-kilovolt transmission line and 155 miles of 115-kilovolt transmission line, would, according to CMP, insure electric reliability and allow for power exports to southern New England.

The project will also result in people losing their land as CMP uses eminent domain to site the new transmission. CMP will also have to remove thousands of acres of forest to site the transmission towers and lines, and – where the 345-volt lines come close to residential properties – subject homeowners and their families to electromagnetic fields, or EMFs, which are implicated in everything from cancer to depression.

The approval was contingent on non-profit Regional Transmission Organization (RTO) ISO-New England including the project in its regional system plan as a reliability transmission upgrade. FERC also granted a 1.25% return of equity, or ROE, rather than the 1.5% CMP had requested, and allowed CMP to recoup costs (for construction and abandonment of existing infrastructure as required) via a future rate filing.

CMP already had an August, 2008 rate hike of 23%, effective Sept. 1, for medium-sized business customers, and a full 32% for large business customers – a rate hike based strictly on the cost of producing electricity, not on the transmission upgrade proposals.

Residential customers didn't get a hike, but many got December, 2008 bills that were double in size from previous winters, as was the case for Deanne Lance, who saw her bill go from $85 to $168 – an increase CMP attributes to estimates performed because crews were repairing power lines downed in a severe winter storm. In fact, Maine's cost per kW hour for electricity is fourth highest in the nation, after Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

In Saco, Maine, the city council has found what it feels is a simpler, and cheaper, solution. On July 20, it approved a 20-year contract with GridSolar to deploy solar panels on city-owned land, near a former landfill.

The solution allows the city to provide electric power without a transmission upgrade, the use of eminent domain, deforestation, the inherent dangers of EMFs, or the potential rate increases inherent in spending 1.5 billion dollars. It also withdraws no usable land from the public domain, since the landfill site can't be repurposed into housing, farmland or industrial space, and requires no long, complicated environmental assessments, since the land is not considered sensitive or endangered habitat.

It is the first land-lease agreement for GridSolar, which has agreed to pay $25,000 a year for the land (which is near a retired landfill), plus property taxes on all future improvements as well, in exchange for what will ultimately be 50 to 100 solar "farms", each on 25 acres, over the next five years.

For those hours/days when the sun doesn't shine, GridSolar plans to use propane/natural gas fired distributed generation and battery backup as the technology improves, and to improve demand-response issues by using interruptible loading techniques like paying customers to reduce use when demand exceeds production.

Can it work? Time will tell, but the outmoded and balky transmission system of yesterday can be "upgraded" until the cows come home without improving reliability or reducing use of fossil fuel generation, so I think it's worth a try. Apparently, the residents of Saco agree.