Owners of homes, farms and businesses in Maine soon may be able to install their own wind turbines, like this one, to help generate clean energy and lower their electricity bills. Photo by Nelson Aerial Productions
Maine is taking a first step to establish small-scale wind power as another tool to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Distributed energy, or on-site, decentralized power generation, accounts for several thousand solar projects in Maine – such as panels on rooftops and in yards. Not so for distributed wind energy projects, which, at 80 to 150 feet in height, are roughly one-third the size of industrial-scale wind projects.
Rhiannon Hampson, the Maine state director of rural development for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said small wind power sites don’t operate in Maine “at this scale that we know of.”
A meeting in Freeport on Aug. 21 drew nearly two dozen federal and state energy and agriculture…
