We Have Solar!
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A long time coming, we are proud to announce that Cobb Hill now has solar power! In November, Integrity Energy installed panels on all the barn roofs and on December 3rd they were turned on. We celebrated with a burrito dinner and sunny cake. These panels should account for a majority of our energy usage and we couldn’t be more thrilled.
The decision to invest in solar energy at Cobb Hill fits in with our guiding principles, especially our commitment to live with and learn about techniques and technologies for more sustainable ways of living. Photovoltaics were far out of reach of our budget twenty years ago when we were planning Cobb Hill, but it has been a long held wish that someday we’d be able to install them. And now that day is here!
We worked with a local installer and crew to help support the VT economy.
The panels were put on the barn roofs to not take up agricultural land.
We are proud that the panels are visually apparent when folks enter the property, especially the many school children and others who come each year for educational visits.
Through this project, the community was strengthened by working through the complexity of impact and feasibility of such a large project.
We are excited to continue to reduce our carbon footprint with the projected 85% renewable energy.
As a community, we’ve had several false starts toward this goal over the last 15 years. We bumped up against too many barriers. What enabled it this time? New energy and persistence from new community members, generosity from individuals, and improvement in technologies - more efficient technologies in this day and age opened up new site potentials on our property.
Many of us are grateful for the dedication of a small group that saw it through to the end. Residents came together to research, get bids from several companies, review, contract with Integrity Energy, manage that relationship, and set up a solar LLC.
The net metered 93.6 KW utility-interactive photovoltaic system is projected to produce an estimated 102,976 kwh a year, which should be approximately 85% of our total energy use for the 22 households on the hill.
The project has been designed to be able to add additional panels on other rooftops in the future. We anticipate discussions about expanding our solar capacity as more electric vehicles and such are added to our property. We plan to consider energy storage to increase our resilience. This current system is tied to the grid and not usable if the electricity goes out. We hope to talk about how our new solar capacity could be engineered to provide back-up energy for us (and neighbors) if there were a prolonged disruption of the grid.