After nearly three years from signing the original contract (Power Purchase Agreement) with Revision Energy, the Town of Brooksville and all of its electrical accounts were finally connected to solar energy for its electrical power. This was celebrated in a ‘ribbon cutting’ ceremony yesterday (2/29/24) at the array in Hampden, attended by state officials, many media representatives, and several other clients being connected to this grid. One client was the College of the Atlantic, represented by their president, a dozen or so students and a member of its faculty. In addition to representing Brooksville, Anne and I also represented the Educational Campus of Deer Isle/Stonington in that the Eco-club students who CAN worked with were the driving force of this arrangement.
One of the co-founders of Revision Energy, an employee-owned company, gave the history of the challenges and successes of renewable energy in our country. Major fossil fuel corporations did all in their power to stop the transition to renewables. He reminded us that just 200 years ago, Mainers got their energy from whale oil. Folks didn’t want to relinquish that, either, for the new source of energy coming from beneath the ground -OIL. It is important to note that Revision Energy is a Maine company, working with other Maine contractors and, in the case of the Hampden solar farm, getting its funding from a local Maine bank, Machias Savings Bank.
We were fortunate that the manager of the project gave us a thorough explanation of how the array works and detailed many of the difficulties responsible for the longer-than-expected time to complete it. In both instances, we were overwhelmed with the complexity and difficulty of the tasks of both building the array and integrating the power into the grid. An array of this size, involving thousands of panels, is a technical/scientific miracle. To hear the power of the array hum in the bright Sun makes it clear that we should all be using clean, sunshine to fuel our homes. Go to https://www.climateactionnet.org/community-solar to sign up for solar at no cost and save money on future monthly bills.