Apr302009
Sprinkling solar power plants throughout Maine
Filed under Alternative energy by david brooks at 7:09 pm
A new, very small Maine company called GridSolar (mostly a guy named Richard Silkman, it seems) is pushing an idea to build scores or hundreds of 2-megawatt solar power plants alongside existing power lines throughout central and western Maine. In a filing with the utilities commission (here, PDF) the firm claims this would make it unnecessary to build a proposed $1.4 billion upgrade to the state’s power grid, which is designed to accommodate alternative energy and increase reliability.
The proposal says each site would require about 25 acres, to be located in or adjacent to power-line property already owned by Central Maine Power Co. (thereby skipping the long, complicated process of getting land for solar sites). The output of each site would be small enough that they could feed energy into the existing grid with straightforward connections.
When there isn’t enough sun, GridPower says it would automatically fire “distributed propane and/or natural gas engine-generators and battery back-up systems to meet those peak loads.”
The filing (which is long and detailed; more than I can digest so far) seems to claim a per-kilowatt cost of about $4,500. That’s more than double the rule-of-thumb cost of building a traditional coal-fired power plant, but avoiding the need for more transmission lines would be a huge savings. And, of course, solar has environmental benefits.
GridSolar has filed a request with Maine’s public utilities commission to become recognized as a transmission and distribution utility, which would give them various legal rights under the complicated utility-regulation system.
Silkman is giving a talk about this at Kittery Trading Post on Tuesday, May 5, from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm. Interesting.
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