Clean energy

An article on clean energy was published by Olivia Gieger in Inside Climate News and provides a prerogative viewpoint on a solution. Could the most eastern city in the USA provide a model for the country’s renewable energy? Portions of this article are extracted from the article.

If you trace the path of one electrical transmission line up the coast of Maine, through and around the state’s rocky outcroppings and over a long causeway, you will finally reach the island city of Eastport, 40 miles from the transmission line’s origin. Here, at the line’s terminus, sits the USA’s easternmost city and the East Coast’s deepest port, once a thriving hub of imports by sea.

Today, the city is home to about 1300 residents, who are no strangers to the harsh winds and strong rains that give remote islands such as this one their rugged character. When big storms rip through, as back-to-back nor’easters did this January, Eastport loses its sole tenuous connection to electricity from the mainland. In 2018, the city’s backup diesel generator shut down and was never replaced, leaving residents to buy their own gas generators or sit in the dark and wait out the hours until the utility could restore power.
“We’re Yankees. We’re used to it. We got candles and lanterns stashed away and we usually get a bucket of water when it looks like the power is going to go out,” said Jeanne Peacock, an Eastport City Councillor and founding member of the city’s Energy Committee. “But it would be nice for everybody else if that didn’t happen.”
The quest to make Eastport energy resilient has put the city at the forefront of Maine’s renewable energy transition and made it a leader in energy independence work for remote communities in the state and beyond.

In 2021, the city was awarded an Energy Transitions Initiative Partnership Project grant from the United States Department of Energy, which funded work to develop localised energy generation and storage.
Now, a community-driven initiative is developing solar and tidal power to feed a microgrid. It would allow the island community to weather hours of outages, detached from the main electrical grid without the high costs and carbon footprint of diesel. The grant launched the feasibility studies and produced the plans for the transition that Eastport is in the middle of building out.

“This very small city on the very eastern edge of the United States is developing what would be a world-class energy facility,” said Nick Battista, the Chief Policy Officer at the Island Institute, a Maine-based non-profit that assisted Eastport in applying for the grant and is working to continue its implementation.

“The fact that Eastport is at the literal end of the line in terms of electricity transmission makes the city a perfect contender for a microgrid,” said Judy Long, the Communications Director of Versant Power, which operates the transmission line. “Because the city is so remote, there is no room for redundancies in case of outages; there are no other sources that can feed energy into the city’s existing line.”

A microgrid would work as such a source. Electricity generated on the island would feed into a battery array, which would feed into the microgrid. The microgrid would remain connected to the regular electrical grid and run as normal when times are good. In the event of a storm or interruption, the microgrid could ‘island off’ for three to four hours, which is the average duration of an outage, allowing residents to flick on their lights, run their refrigerators and heat their homes as normal.

The work requires various parts locking together: the solar, the tidal, the battery and the grid itself must all coordinate. In January, Eastport Community Solar’s 1 MW solar array will go online. It will join an existing 1.8 MW of distributed solar on Eastport. Because of the seasonal and weather variations of solar, the distributed solar alone will not be enough.

For that, the community looks to what has been one of its greatest assets throughout history: the island’s powerful tides. As water moves from the Bay of Fundy and the Atlantic into the narrow straight to Eastport’s east, which, just to keep things confusing, is called the Western Passage, it accelerates to velocities of 3-3.5 m/s.

“This site off of Eastport is one of the best sites in the country for tidal power,” said Stuart Davies, CEO of the Ocean Renewable Power Company, which develops tidal and river power turbines.
The company plans to submerge a 1-2 MW tidal power generator with long circular blades like those of a push mower in the waters of Eastport’s Western Passage by 2030.

“Tidal energy is kind of in the forgotten asset class relative to wind and solar over the last decade,” added Stuart. He expects that the technology will finally see broader commercialisation in the next five to ten years.

For the power utility Versant as well, the Eastport project stands to be something of a testing ground for future energy technologies. It will be Versant’s first foray at incorporating a microgrid into its regular grid. The project offers an experiment in designing additional protection systems so that even if there is a fault within the small grid, it will not break down. “Those lessons,” Judy said, “would be transferable to other parts of the grid, as well as to future microgrids”.

In the meantime, the community and the city’s energy committee are helping Eastport homes use less energy to begin with. Over two-thirds of the island’s homes were built in the early 1900s, so the committee has secured grant funding that helps residents identify where their homes are leaking heat and need improved insulation. They have collaborated with the local non-profit WindowDressers to cover the cost of installing better-insulated windows.

“In my mind, all the energy things are interconnected: renewable energy, energy efficiency and the microgrid,” said Sharon Klein, a University of Maine Economics Professor who specialises in community energy projects. “A microgrid is really great for a community because if there are power outages, a microgrid can help them not lose power to those critical loads while the rest of the grid is down. It is even better if that microgrid can be powered by renewable energy, and you’re going to need less energy to begin with if you’re more energy efficient.”

As someone who works with other community energy resilience projects, Sharon thinks the biggest lesson from Eastport’s endeavour into building a microgrid is simply the work of navigating the bureaucratic process of applying for grants, laying out a plan and working with the community to build support for the work ahead. “There are definitely lessons that will be able to be transferable from community to community. Even just the starting point of getting to understand the grid and your needs, that stuff can transfer.”

Inside Climate News (ICN) was launched in 2007. Six years later it earned a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and it now runs the oldest and largest dedicated climate newsroom in the nation. David Sassoon is the Founder and Publisher and Vernon Loeb is the Executive Editor of ‘Clean Energy’.