I received a press release by email but can’t find much more information about this, but it seems a 167.4kW photovoltaic system has been installed by the North Conway Water Precinct, using federal stimulus money. It’s a ground mounted system includes 744 solar panels and 2 inverters tracking output and efficiency. and was officially turned [...]

I didn’t realize that some of the nation’s first solar photovoltaic systems were in Massachusetts, including a 100-kilowatt unit installed way back in 1981 in Beverly Mass. (here’s a 2001 article about it, which says it operated without incident for 20 years) and a whole neighborhood home/business system in Gardner, Mass. in 1985 - here’s [...]

National Grid is turning on a 1.2-megawatt solar photovoltaic facility atop its Northbridge, Mass. distribution plant. Globe story here.
It’s the first of several megawatt-level solar facilities going on line in the next year or so; I’m going to have to start trimming out some of the smaller solar facilities from my regional alternative energy map!

Two years ago I wrote about CitizenRe, a company that leased solar panels to homeowners - that is, put them on people’s houses to reduce their power bills but kept a portion of the resulting income. Their business model had a dose of Amway-ish pyramid-like* schemes (you made money if you got other people to [...]

It occurred to me over the weekend that New Hampshire recently hit the psychologically interesting point of having a megawatt of installed photovoltaic solar panels. The last time I checked, 265 photovoltaic installations with an installed capacity of 787 kilowatts were on the state’s net-metering system. Stonyfield’s 50-kw and PSNH’s 51-kw rooftop systems have now [...]

I hadn’t realized that PSNH wants to build a large (up to 5 megawatt, or 5,000 kilowatt) solar farm atop the capped Manchester city landfill. This would be the first almost-utility-scale photovoltaic plant in the New England, 11 times the size of the Brockton Brightfield and 100 times the size of the biggest solar sites [...]

New Hampshire is puttering along in the rooftop-solar-power business, with homeowners having applied for more than 600 kilowatts worth of Renewable Energy Fund rebates, mostly in 5-kilowatt photovoltaic increments. That’s the solar-power equivalent of sandlot baseball.
With our climate we’ll never probably enter the big leagues, like a 400-megawatt PV plant proposed for the California desert, [...]

In April I posted about an intriguing idea from a company called Grid Solar, which wanted to put large-ish (2 MW) solar arrays throughout Maine, using land under or alongside existing power lines to avoid the difficulty of getting space.This plan, which would have required about 25 acres per site, put it somewhere between the [...]

The Telegraph’s headquarters is in a bland rectangular metal-sided building in an industrial park full of blank rectangular buildings. (The paper outgrew the funky brick Telegraph building on Nashua’s Main Street decades ago, alas.) Like all such “parks” - what a misnomer - it is an ugly wasteland, but on the other hand all those flat roofs atop businesses that use lots of electricity are perfect places for solar arrays: Easy access, no shadows, and no need to send the power very far. If there’s any place that should be getting such distributed power, it should be industrial office parks.

Here’s another objective confirmation of our cloudy present: The above graphic is from the Fat Spaniel site that records solar-power collection for a variety of small and midsize facilities around the country. This chart is for a good-sized (38.8 KW) rooftop panel on MIT’s Building 57 - but look at those green bars! At this time of year (summer solstice, you know) it should be generating at least 300 KWH a day, but for all practical purposes over the past week there has only been one day with sunshine. With today’s downpour, I wouldn’t look for much of a change.

A 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 filing with the utilities commission (here, PDF) 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.

So says Mass High Tech, which reports: “The number of primary solar installers registered with (Massachusetts) has jumped from 25 to 75 since the state launched its $68 million Commonwealth Solar program last December, and that doesn’t include the dozens of subcontractors used by those firms”
I love this line from the story: “But let’s face [...]

When I first compiled a Google map of alternative-power sources in and around New Hampshire (the map is here - it’s also linked in the right-hand column), the thing that hit home was the lack of big photovoltaic sites. I set a lower limit of 15 megawatt for most plants, but had to drop it [...]