A pair of community microgrid projects in Massachusetts are already helping to inspire similar projects in the state before construction has even begun.

The city of Chelsea and Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood are each developing projects that supporters hope can become powerful case studies for the potential of microgrids to increase resilience and create other benefits for residents.

Chelsea has ordered equipment for a microgrid that will connect municipal facilities, and is targeting a construction date in the second half of 2024. Chinatown is finalizing plans for a system to provide solar power and backup energy storage to a 200-unit affordable housing apartment building. 

“We do see this serving as a model for the nation if we can pull it off,” said Alexander Train, Chelsea’s director of housing and community development.

The list of communities considering whether to follow their lead includes Cambridge, Lynn, and Milton.

In the broadest sense, microgrids are small-scale energy systems in which power is produced, distributed, and consumed, typically all within a self-contained area such as a college campus or hospital complex. Microgrids can often operate independently from the main grid, providing continuous power, even in case of disruptions to the regional supply, and can help cut energy costs. 

Though they come in all configurations and sizes, microgrids have historically generated power with fossil fuels. But as the transition to sustainable energy accelerates, more organizations are looking at ways to combine renewable energy and battery storage to create cleaner microgrids. 

A unique model

Several years ago, semi-retired engineer David Dayton saw in this evolving model an opportunity to improve the health and safety of environmental justice communities — areas that bear a disproportionate environmental burden and are often home to many low-income residents and people of color. 

Solar panels could cut energy costs, while batteries could provide power to critical facilities, such as municipal buildings, community centers, and senior housing, in case of power outages. Batteries could also be used to sell power back to the main grid to help pay for the system.

To get this vision off the ground, Dayton reached out to organizations he was familiar with, including the Green Justice Coalition and private companies Peregrine Energy Group and Synapse Energy Economics. The participants identified Chelsea and Chinatown as good candidates for a community microgrid. Both communities have high populations of immigrants and people of color, and both have median household incomes well below the average for the area. And they are vulnerable to climate change impacts including flooding and dangerous temperatures as the result of the urban heat island effect. 

In 2018, the group Dayton assembled acquired grants from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center for feasibility studies in the two communities.

The model developed during this process proposes to create the nation’s first community-owned “virtual microgrid.” The designs use cloud-based software to connect solar installations and batteries in locations that aren’t necessarily adjacent to each other, a departure from the conventional model in which the components of the microgrid are physically connected. This approach allows more flexibility in deciding what facilities can participate, particularly helpful when a community would like to include vital facilities that are geographically spread out. 

“It’s a microgrid without borders,” Dayton said. “We can add any building to the network at any time — they don’t have to be contiguous.”

Today, the first two projects are making progress. In Chelsea, a design has been created that includes 500 kilowatt-hour batteries at both the police station and city hall, as well as a 400 kilowatt solar array at the department of public works facility. Plans are already in the works to start gathering more community input by the end of the year about expanding the system to other essential locations such as senior housing, churches, or health care centers. 

“We want this system to proliferate as fast as we possibly can,” Train said.

In Chinatown, project developers have had to scale back their initial ambitions of connecting several multifamily housing buildings. They are now focused on serving Masspike Towers, a privately owned development of 190 affordable units, before expanding. The plan, still being finalized, is to build a solar installation and share the savings across all residents in a model similar to community solar. Battery storage will help keep common areas powered and extensive energy efficiency measures will reduce overall consumption. 

“Our goal is to bring the benefits of clean energy and decarbonization incentives to a low-income urban community that has historically missed out on a lot of those benefits,” said Lydia Lowe, executive director of the Chinatown Community Land Trust, one of the community partners in the project

Learning lessons

As work has progressed in Chelsea and Chinatown, other communities have started to wonder about the possibilities. And the two ongoing projects are offering valuable lessons about how to make community microgrids work. 

Financing has emerged as a potential major sticking point. In Chelsea, where the city will own the system, the city council voted to provide $4 million in funding to the project. That money – along with federal support, the savings created by solar generation, and the revenue from selling stored powerback onto the grid – is enough to get the project up and running. Building on municipal sites that each have only one tenant also helps simplify the design and logistics. 

In Chinatown, however, the city is providing some funding, but not enough to cover the entire project, making it more challenging to structure the financing in a way that is affordable yet satisfies potential investors. 

“It is a little bit tougher. We were able to get the city on board in Chelsea,” said Sari Kayyali, microgrid manager for the two projects. “We’ve been working with them to find a workable scope that can pay back investors in a timely manner.”

The work thus far has also highlighted the importance of the community-led ethos that distinguishes the approach from other microgrids, which are generally privately owned and operated. From the beginning, Dayton and other planners felt it was essential to the underlying mission of environmental justice that community members have a lot of say in determining the goals, design, and operations of these community microgrids. In both Chelsea and Chinatown, the planners divided the $75,000 each community received, dedicating half to engineering and technical planning, and giving the other half to community organizations to conduct outreach and education. 

In Chelsea, these efforts were key to securing the microrid’s future: The strong support of the community helped sway a few skeptical city councilors to vote for funding for the project, said Elena González, technical director of Climable, a nonprofit that has conducted community engagement and outreach for Chelsea, Chinatown, and Cambridge.

But the importance of community involvement is far more than just strategic, supporters said. 

“These microgrid projects empower communities and give them a role in the way that energy development happens,” González said. “This is something that has a huge impact in people’s lives and it is important that the community leads.”

Microgrid model spreads in Massachusetts as cities look to lessen costs, outages   is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

A St. Paul, Minnesota, college’s microgrid research center is preparing to expand after securing significant new state and federal funding.

The University of St. Thomas’ Center for Microgrid Research plans to triple its three-person staff and enroll more students thanks to money from a $7.5 million state legislative appropriation and $11 million in federal defense bill earmarks secured by U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum.

State officials who championed the funding said they hope the center’s education and research efforts can help train future grid technicians and smooth the state’s path to 100% clean electricity by 2040.

“We’re at a time of not only a great transition but of a great opportunity,” said state Sen. Nick Frentz, a Democrat from Mankato. “We’ll be looking at transmission, distributed generation and innovation as we transition, and funding for the St. Thomas microgrid research is a part of the state’s plan to lead.”

Microgrids are small, hyperlocal networks of electricity generation and storage systems that together can operate independently of the rest of the power grid. They’re often used by military, healthcare or research campuses that require a level of reliability greater than what the local utility can provide. 

But they’re not just expensive backup power for wealthy institutions. Microgrids are also expected to play a role in the clean energy transition, helping to get the most value out of clean energy investments and connecting customers to one another in new ways.

“Microgrids are another opportunity for clean energy,” said John Farrell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and director of the Energy Democracy Initiative.

Microgrids could help balance variable power sources such as wind and solar, helping to absorb and store surplus generation and share it with the grid later when it’s needed, Farrell explained. While microgrids can be powered by fossil fuel backup generators, they also can run on solar panels, whose value can be greater when they are networked with arrays on multiple sites. 

The University of St. Thomas has been developing its campus microgrid for about a decade. Today, it consists of a 48-kilowatt rooftop solar array along with a diesel generator, a lead acid battery pack, and an inverter that converts direct current to alternating current. A campus substation connects to Xcel’s local grid. 

Like most microgrids, the St. Thomas system can run in “island” mode, meaning it can operate even when the power grid fails by drawing on the battery, solar panels and backup generation.

The Center for Microgrid Research opened in 2020 as a way to build research and education programming around its campus microgrid. Mahmoud Kabalan, the center’s director, was hired in 2017 from Villanova University to teach engineering and helped secure seed funding from Xcel Energy’s Renewable Development Fund for the program.

Don Weinkauf, the school’s dean of engineering, said the new state and federal funding will allow the center to expand both the program and the microgrid system itself. 

“This stuff is expensive,” Weinkauf said. “Each piece of equipment is on the scale of a million dollars, and right now, we are expanding to reach a 1-megawatt capacity.”

The center will have 10 full-time employees next year and be able to enroll up to 25 students. More staff and students will allow more collaboration with utilities, corporations, and fellow researchers. Within the next few years, the microgrid will connect to more than five buildings, including a new science, technology and arts center, dorms and a parking facility.

Kabalan said he expects more funding from the U.S. Department of Defense, which sees the program as a workforce training ground and source of applied research to help design, test and implement microgrid technologies.

“This funding will position the state and the nation to produce innovative engineers that can address the need for microgrids and distributed energy technologies,” Kabalan said. “A big part of what we do is educate and train engineers.”

The center is collaborating with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on a military initiative to install microgrids at every military base by 2035, Kabalan said. Research related to that project will be publicly available to other microgrid operators and researchers. Students and faculty have other clients and supporters, including utilities Xcel Energy and Connexus Energy.

Part of the center’s design and strategy has been to serve as a place where clients can test how their equipment works in a microgrid. The technology available includes test bays to plug in products, controllers, relayers and emulators capable of creating simulated environments. 

“Interested parties can literally roll in their equipment and we can test their technology at full scale,” Weinkauf said. “This is an industry-friendly center that can help us, and the state of Minnesota, navigate our future grid.”

Students like the hands-on quality of the microgrid center. Engineering student Oreoluwa John Ero, a research assistant at the center, has helped develop models to attach the new STEAM building to the university’s microgrid.

“I like the ability to see and practice the different things you learn in school and the chance to learn while on the job,” Ero said.

Utility industry professionals who have visited the center also like the hands-on approach. Connexus Energy engineering and system operations director Jared Newton said the center “immediately resonated with me because I saw students learn on real-world equipment that we use. The problems they were trying to solve and the tools they were using were familiar.”

As climate change and aging infrastructure make weather-related power outages more common, Kabalan thinks microgrids will become more common for critical infrastructure such as hospitals, prisons, data centers, food storage areas, cooling centers and government facilities.

Ero sees how the microgrid could transform the power grid in the United States and in his home country of Nigeria, where electricity outages are common and can last for hours and weeks.

“It’s a technology that should be made available to people,” Ero said, “not just in Nigeria, but all over the world.”

State, federal funding fuels expansion of Minnesota microgrid research center is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Minneapolis “green zone” community leaders are contemplating their options after utility Xcel Energy this week unexpectedly revoked funding for a resilience-focused microgrid project.

The city has identified the neighborhoods as high priorities for green investment due to their demographics and histories of environmental injustice.

The Resilient Minneapolis Project aims to install solar-powered microgrids on two community centers and a job training center. The locations would serve as hubs in the event of climate or other emergencies, offering food, electricity, information, and medical care for neighbors and first responders.

“There are substantial benefits to these communities and the grid,” said Jamez Staples, a North Minneapolis clean energy entrepreneur and the visionary behind the Regional Apprenticeship Training Center, one of the planned resilience hub sites. The others are the American Indian Center and Sabathani Community Center in south Minneapolis.

Xcel Energy had committed to using $9 million in ratepayer funds to install and operate batteries at each site before abruptly pulling that funding this week, putting the entire project on hold until the city and community leaders can assess next steps and possible replacement funding.

“We have been informed of Xcel’s decision to discontinue the Resilient Minneapolis Project and are disappointed. These projects were negotiated with the City of Minneapolis and approved by the state Public Utilities Commission and hundreds of hours of collaboration and evaluation have gone into making the projects a reality,” a city spokesperson said in a written statement.

The city is in the process of adopting a new Climate Equity Plan, updating its decade-old climate plan with a new focus on equity. The resilience hub concept is a key piece of that plan, and the city said in its statement that it would continue communicating with Xcel Energy to determine if the project could be revived.

Xcel Energy cited inflation as the reason it was walking away from the project. In a statement, the utility said project costs had increased more than 70% and that supply chain issues “challenged the project timeline.”

“We remain deeply invested in working with our partners and intend to continue discussions on potential future collaborations, including community resiliency projects, as we continue our commitment to connect with and support our communities,” the company said.

The announcement comes a week after the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission approved a rate increase for the company that was less than half of what it originally sought. In the wake of that decision, the company said it would need to reevaluate its planned investments in clean energy.

Research by Bloomberg NEF showed lithium-ion battery pack prices increased 7% from 2021 to 2022 and would likely increase slightly again this year. Lithium prices have significantly escalated as demand grows from various markets for automobile manufacturers, battery and battery storage companies.

Staples and his partner, Michael Krause of Kandiyo Consulting, have contacted the city, Sabathani and the American Indian Center about options for continuing the project. Construction crews are already replacing Sabathani’s roof this summer, a project in part driven by the opportunity to install solar panels as part of the Resilient Minneapolis Project.

With money available from the Inflation Reduction Act, the state and other sources, Staples hopes the Resilient Minneapolis Project can continue even without Xcel.

Xcel Energy pulls funding for Minneapolis resilience hub projects is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Editor’s note: Interviews with Alexis Massol González, Alberto Colón, and Rómulo Ortiz were conducted in Spanish. Their quotations and those from the Energy Bureau hearings were translated to English by the reporter, Carolina Baldin. 

The U.S. Department of Energy has committed $1 billion to develop solar energy in Puerto Rico, to help the island meet its goal of 100% renewables and to add resilience to a system plagued by hurricane damage, poor maintenance and debilitating blackouts. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has visited the island multiple times, and the department has promised additional funding for renewables once an in-depth study is completed.

Community leaders who have long pushed for solar are hopeful. But they are adamant that the funding must prioritize community-driven, decentralized rooftop solar. They don’t want to see more solar farms, which they say can damage land and continue reliance on shipping power across the island; and they are skeptical of the role of LUMA, the company that runs Puerto Rico’s grid since it was privatized in June 2021.

On March 18, Casa Pueblo, a prominent community organization in the mountain town of Adjuntas, will inaugurate “Adjuntas Pueblo Solar,” an independent solar project that will supply 20 businesses with solar energy. The inauguration will coincide with Casa Pueblo’s “Marcha del Sol: Puerto Rico Triunfa,” where residents and national and international groups will gather for cultural activities and typical Puerto Rican food. 

Clean energy advocates see Casa Pueblo’s work including Adjuntas Pueblo Solar as an island-wide model, allowing communities energy independence and the ability to decide what solar projects work best in their own areas, including with the new funding.

On Feb. 21, the Department of Energy released a formal request for information regarding the Puerto Rico Energy Resilience Fund, through which the department will manage the $1 billion.

The request came days after contentious hearings in the capital, San Juan, regarding LUMA Energy’s performance in managing the grid, and new metrics the company must meet, including on the interconnection of solar. The hearings revealed shortcomings in LUMA’s ability to administer and maintain the grid.

In the request for comments, open through April 21, the Department of Energy says it wants to hear from “industry, community-based organizations, federal and state government agencies, state and local coalitions, research institutions, and other stakeholders.” 

The department has said funding for solar will roll out as soon as this summer, prioritizing “vulnerable households and households that include individuals with disabilities.”

The funding will be administered through the newly formed Energy Resilience Fund, which is managed by the department’s Grid Deployment Office in consultation with the Federal Energy Management Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. A second round of funding will focus on energy resilience solutions like microgrids and community solar, similar to what Casa Pueblo did at Adjuntas Pueblo Solar.

“There are many eyes on this project,” said Alexis Massol González, founder of Casa Pueblo. “This is a top-notch model. … We Puerto Ricans are proud of having a project like this. May the Department of Energy come and study it.”

A larger plan for energy resilience

The Department of Energy will start allocating the energy resilience funding while also continuing an ongoing study, known as the Puerto Rico Grid Resilience and Transitions to 100% Renewable Energy Study, or PR100. That study is scheduled for release in December 2023, and the department has promised that based on the results additional funding will be allocated.

A PR100 progress report released after its first year calls for widespread installation of rooftop solar panels in Puerto Rico, to provide decentralized energy and make people less reliant on the troubled grid, including high-voltage transmission wires that send energy from power plants on the south coast to population centers in the north.

Disseminating information about this study was one of the goals of Granholm’s visit in early February. She met with residents and local leaders in Salinas, Vieques, Culebra, and Loíza — communities hit hard by hurricanes, disinvestment, and pollution from fossil fuel power plants and waste. 

“I noticed that she was very considerate and listened to all the stakeholders,” said Alberto Colón, from Comunidad Guayamesa, an organization that installs and maintains solar panels for elderly residents in Guayama, a town on the south coast near AES’s massive coal plant. “I understand that it is not the same that you sit at a table and someone tells you something, compared to you actually going there and seeing it for yourself.”

During Hurricane María in 2017, Guayama and surrounding communities suffered landslides and flooding that spread toxic coal ash. Many families were without power for months.

To promote energy resilience, Colón and other community members installed solar panels on 25 homes and plan to add five more. But the funding they received was used only for installation. When the projects need repairs, “we sacrifice our own pockets,” he said. “It’s not a matter of installing the equipment and leaving it in God’s hands. We make sure to give it the necessary maintenance.”

There are several large solar farms near Guayama, but residents feel these installations have exacerbated flooding and taken land that should be used for crops. They are adamant that new solar should come in smaller rooftop arrays, not as utility-scale solar.

“If we have enough rooftops to do the work, it is unnecessary to sacrifice the land to generate what we need,” Colón said. “We have enough rooftops to generate three, four times what we need.” Indeed the PR100 one-year progress report, whose scenarios “rely on a significant increase in rooftop solar,” found that “renewable energy potential in Puerto Rico significantly exceeds total energy demand now and through 2050.”

Colón hopes Granholm will recommend to the governor of Puerto Rico that the island’s administration “decides once and for all to install rooftop solar panels.” “We are crossing our fingers that it happens this way,” Colón said.

In Salinas, a municipality near Guayama, a community center called Centro Comunal El Coquí also provides families with rooftop solar panels, having installed the equipment in four households. Like Colón, leaders in Salinas want solar energy to be deployed through rooftops instead of solar farms. They’ve intervened in legal proceedings to try to block utility-scale solar farms in the region, without success.

“Community groups and environmental groups generally throughout Puerto Rico favor distributed renewable energy, not utility-scale, for a lot of reasons,” said Ruth Santiago, an environmental lawyer who lives in Salinas and has represented nonprofit organizations and community groups for over 30 years. “We have sprawling construction in Puerto Rico — because of the limited geographic space — and we are already below the agricultural land preservation target.”

The sense of urgency in communities like Guayama and Salinas has its roots in years of struggle with the grid including after hurricanes Irma, María and Fiona.

“We are tired,” said Rómulo Ortiz, from Centro Comunal El Coquí. “We are tired, and we want action.”

Residents’ frustration and anger are aggravated by the lack of data on the grid situation.

This failing was discussed during evidentiary hearings between Feb. 7 and Feb. 10 at the Energy Bureau, the independent agency that regulates energy on the island. The hearings aimed to set targets and ways to measure LUMA’s performance in operating and maintaining the grid.

During the meetings, LUMA employees said it is difficult to measure the total amount of energy that enters the transmission system, and they have struggled to locate customers with complaints about outages or diagnose problems with the system.

On the second day of the hearings, LUMA officials were unable to provide an estimate of how much of the grid it had assessed. Energy Bureau President Edison Avilés-Deliz said it is part of LUMA’s duties to conduct these general assessments and that the company had had enough time to do it. “I cannot believe it, honestly,” he said.

The vice president for utility transformation at LUMA, Don Cortez, said four more years of inventory work would be necessary to establish the actual condition of the system “pole by pole.”

Critics say the island doesn’t have that much time, another reason why new decentralized solar installations are necessary.

During the hearings, economist and professor José Alameda-Lozada described access to energy as a human right. He suggested a new system of penalties and compensation for LUMA that would try to ensure LUMA provides better service. In other testimony, University of Puerto Rico electrical engineering professor Agustín Rivera said that the Energy Bureau should create a metric to measure the modernity of Puerto Rico’s electric system.

“We are in the process of leaving behind centralized generation,” said Avilés-Deliz in response to these suggestions. “There are a lot of changes. We need to go step by step.”

New interconnection goals

After the evidentiary hearings at Puerto Rico’s Energy Bureau, LUMA will need, for the first time, to comply with specific metrics on interconnecting solar, including presumably new solar funded with the $1 billion. According to Puerto Rico’s interconnection law, LUMA is required to complete interconnection projects within 30 days, but that deadline is often not met. According to testimony reviewed during the hearings, LUMA’s average duration for activation was approximately 33 days in the first quarter of fiscal year 2023, and reached 36 days in the second quarter of the same fiscal year. But LUMA has previously not needed to report metrics to show its performance on interconnection.

“LUMA didn’t have an interconnection metric,” said Santiago, who also wants LUMA to present residents with formal interconnection and net metering agreements. “They didn’t want it; they opposed it.”

During the hearings, Commissioner Lilian Mateo said metrics need to be designed to achieve and go beyond the mandates of the interconnection law, even as LUMA will likely see a significant increase in demands for interconnection.

LUMA did not respond to emailed questions about interconnection or requests for an interview.

A potential model 

Casa Pueblo has long been a model for solar energy and community resilience.

Before launching Adjuntas Pueblo Solar, Casa Pueblo had already provided solar panels to more than 350 homes and businesses in the small mountainside town throughout the years, and residents came from other hurricane-damaged areas in the aftermath of 2017’s hurricanes Irma and María.

After Hurricane María, “Casa Pueblo became an energy oasis,” Massol González said, where people would go to make phone calls made possible by energy from the solar panels. Solar fueled a radio station that broadcast throughout the crisis, providing crucial information and helping family members find each other.

The work to create Adjuntas Pueblo Solar started in April 2019, with the aim of reducing commercial buildings’ energy costs and “creat[ing] a commitment with the planet,” Massol González said.

A bakery, pizza place and ice cream shop are among the businesses newly acquiring solar on their roofs. With the help of two microgrids, they will share excess energy with other businesses in a cooperative way.

Massol González and his allies don’t want to ditch the island’s larger grid altogether. Rather, they want to install solar connected to the grid, helping to make the whole system less reliant on fossil fuels and more resilient.

“We are not destroying the country’s model,” Massol González said. “It is a way of fortifying the country’s model.”

In Puerto Rico, advocates want the clean energy revolution to be local is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Tropical Storm Irene caused widespread devastation when it roared into Vermont in the summer of 2011. And few communities fared worse than the remote mountain town of Rochester.

Tucked between the two main ranges of the Green Mountains, Rochester was cut off in every direction for days after flood waters destroyed access roads and other infrastructure. The town’s 1,000-or-so residents, stuck on what had essentially become an island, had no power, internet or phone service. 

“People had to queue up in front of the grocery store and be escorted in with flashlights,” recalled Jeffrey Gephart, the town’s energy coordinator. “And somebody had to round up a pump and generator, cordon off the gas station and pump people their 5- or 10-gallon allotment.”

Such extremes promise to get worse in the face of climate change, especially for a town that, because of its valley location, is especially prone to “significant weather,” Gephart said. With that in mind, the local utility, Green Mountain Power, is building a microgrid that will power the central village during outages.

“When the village has an interruption, the system will act like an emergency generator,” Gephart said. So for residents in more rural locations who are also without power, “there will be access to food and some electricity there.”

The project is part of Green Mountain Power’s new “resiliency zone” initiative, aimed at making the electric grid more durable in some of the state’s most vulnerable communities. The utility will do three or four projects a year to start, “but we will eventually accelerate that schedule given the pace of climate change,” said Kristin Carlson, vice president for strategy and external relations. 

The testing ground for the program was the western Vermont town of Panton, a rural community of about 700 residents on Lake Champlain. Green Mountain Power spent several years working out the complexities of setting up a microgrid there powered by a 5-megawatt solar array and a 4-megawatt battery system. In operation for about a year now, the microgrid covers 62 customers, including some town offices, homes, businesses and small farms. 

The town hasn’t yet experienced a storm severe enough to cause the microgrid to kick in. But there are benefits that accrue to the broader grid nonetheless — the utility can tap the microgrid’s stored solar power during peak periods, when energy prices are higher, in order to lower costs for all utility customers. 

“We are thinking differently about resiliency, as a two-way system,” Carlson said. “It’s a constant sharing and balancing and flowing.”

The Panton microgrid is believed to be the first in the country to be backed up solely by renewable energy, and not by fossil fuels. 

“It was a couple of years of engineering work,” said Josh Castonguay, vice president of engineering and innovation. “We kept solving one problem after another, and finally got to the point of getting this fully functioning microgrid. Now, we are carrying all that stuff forward.” 

The utility, which serves about 270,000 residential and business customers, is pinpointing the communities most in need of resiliency zones by looking at outage data, broadband availability, and CDC vulnerability data. The communities receiving the first round of microgrids — each of which will be customized to meet local needs — are Rochester, Brattleboro and Grafton. 

In planning the microgrids, the utility carefully considers which types of customers make the most sense to cover, Castonguay said. The size of the microgrid has to be limited by definition, “as the bigger you make it, the more things can go wrong, which is what you’re trying to protect against.”

The microgrid in Rochester will look much like the one in Panton, only not as big. The solar array and the battery will each have a 1 MW capacity. The solar array will be sited on an abandoned gravel pit close to the village, and the panels will be elevated high enough to allow cattle from a local organic farm to graze underneath, Gephart said. 

In Grafton, a village in southern Vermont, the focus is on about 60 residents who live “up in the woods” and experience a higher number of outages and poor cellular connectivity, Castonguay said. The approach there is to provide the residents with home battery storage devices as a backup source. 

As it has done for several years through a separate home battery leasing program, the utility will draw on those batteries when they are not needed by the homeowners. 

“We’ve built up a lot of knowledge as to how to leverage these batteries,” Castonguay said. 

In Brattleboro, a former mill town in the Connecticut River valley bordering New Hampshire, the utility is targeting about 200 manufactured homes that are part of the Tri-Park Cooperative Housing Corporation, the largest manufactured home community in the state and a major source of affordable housing.

The Whetstone Brook, a tributary of the Connecticut River, flows through town and once powered the mills. But it is also a source of flooding, and during Irene, “it took out a huge swath of manufactured homes,” said Stephen Dotson, Brattleboro’s sustainability coordinator. “We really saw we had to change how resilient we were in a number of ways. With flood mitigation, of course, but also to deal with power outages.”

Many Tri-Park members are elderly, and/or without family support, transportation or cell phones, said Kay Curtis, a former board member who said she expressed her concern about these residents to town and utility officials. 

“I was concerned about them losing power and not having the resources to leave or protect themselves,” Curtis said in an email exchange. “Some are unable to navigate the steps to leave their homes. I personally visited an elderly resident during a power outage and told her not to leave her bed until the power came back on. The temperature in her home had dipped to 40 degrees.”

Green Mountain Power approached the town about a resiliency zone, and has since negotiated an easement with the cooperative that will allow them to install a battery storage unit that will kick in if the power goes out. 

The $50,000 lease payment for the easement will go into a fund to help residents make their homes more energy efficient. 

The section of the cooperative the microgrid will serve, called Mountain Home Park, has been subject to periodic flooding for decades, said Mary Houghton, a board member. The cooperative is working on a major redevelopment plan that includes the relocation of homes that are situated directly in the floodway. But it’s an expensive proposition that will take time, she said. 

“The goal is to provide people with assistance and make it as easy as possible to move,” Houghton said. “It’s a very pretty location by a stream, and it’s lovely until it floods.”

Solar-powered microgrids add climate resilience in rural Vermont communities is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.