How this tiny town in Maine is keeping the lights on through ferocious storms

Eastport, Maine’s location on the nation’s easternmost edge, has made reliable power a consistent challenge. Recent climate shifts have brought more frequent and fierce storms to the remote island town of roughly 1,300, which counts on a single cable straddling the rough waters for its power, making outages more persistent.

But Eastport leaders believe the natural forces that repeatedly knock out their power can also be harnessed to provide crucial backup power.

The city will become a testing ground for a new kind of microgrid, a small, self-contained power system that can switch on when the town gets disconnected. A proposed solution under development combines solar panels, batteries, and a tidal generator to store enough power to last for four hours—enough time to weather the next outage. It’ll keep City Hall open and allow the remote town to stay online.

“I’m a true believer in climate change,” said Jeanne Peacock, an Eastport City Council member who has supported efforts to build the microgrid. “I see the need, and I’m trying to show that this can work, and it can work well for us.”

Microgrids function as smaller, more geographically discrete versions of the larger electrical grid. Typically set up for a specific institution or piece of infrastructure—say, a college campus, military base, or water utility—these are fully functioning, independent grids that can both generate and circulate power. They can be connected to the larger grid to share and distribute power, but by definition they’re self-sustaining, at least for a certain amount of time.

Wood Mackenzie, an energy consultancy, found roughly 500 such setups in the United States, and it pegs the annual growth rate of new projects at 32%. Cities have long harnessed this technology to protect vital infrastructure, like wastewater plants. But traditionally, they’ve been powered by generators, since the importance of the infrastructure, and the high cost of storing significant power in a battery, made renewables too unreliable and expensive.

However, long-term trends toward cheaper solar panels and better batteries have made renewable power an increasingly appealing option for new microgrids. Research from the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a clean energy think tank, found that battery prices fell 79% from 2013 to 2023, and they continue to become cheaper, following Wright’s Law—basically, every time production doubles, prices drop 20%. The U.S. Department of Energy sees microgrids as key parts of the country’s energy future, calling them “essential building blocks” for a resilient energy system.

“Since I started working on this in 2020, a lot more cities are becoming excited,” said Michael Liebman, a manager at RMI. “The fact that there are all of these different grants and loans available within the Inflation Reduction Act definitely helps the business case for these projects.”

There’s no shortage of examples of new solar-powered projects across the country, whether city-owned or developed in partnership with a city.

• In Ann Arbor, Michigan, legislation passed to create an alternate utility to speed up the installation of renewable power, with plans to connect new solar panels to a city microgrid.
• In Chelsea, Massachusetts, a working-class, majority-Latino community has set up a solar-powered microgrid.
• The community coalition Together New Orleans worked with the city and other local groups to create a series of microgrids that can provide backup power for lifesaving health equipment.
• A microgrid in Guanica, Puerto Rico, helps power the fire department.
• There’s a Brooklyn project testing the use of microgrids to power school buses.
• And a utility-built microgrid in Hot Springs, North Carolina, helped the rural town recover power after Hurricane Helene.

Allan Schurr, chief commercial officer for Houston-based microgrid developer Enchanted Rock, said he’s seeing more interest and investments in natural-gas-powered microgrids for cities, communities, and critical infrastructure. A step up from diesel in terms of carbon emissions, they’re still fossil-fuel-based, but provide days of power during severe disasters, including the recent winter storms that hit Texas.

But that calculus is slowly changing. Experts at RMI argue that cost trends are starting to shift toward more sustainable microgrid options. RMI’s analysis shows that for certain areas, cities can achieve monthly savings on day one, assuming that a portion of the system obtains up-front financing. Liebman, who worked on deploying microgrids in Puerto Rico for RMI, used philanthropic money as capital to put these systems into place. He says U.S. cities can now do the same using Inflation Reduction Act credits and incentives.

IRA incentives might go away during a Trump administration. But Liebman remains a long-term booster of the technology; he believes more states will follow the lead of California and Texas and support this infrastructure themselves, as it’s so beneficial that there will continue to be demand.

Another benefit of these systems, argues Liebman, is that they can produce a new income stream for cities. By generating and storing renewable power, and then selling it back to the utility during periods of peak demand, these systems can help pay for themselves, adding to the feasibility of installing more microgrids. Instead of buying generators that operate only during an emergency, why not build out infrastructure that’s always benefiting a city’s resilience and bottom line?

Projects like the one in Eastport remain conceptual at the moment, dependent on a number of grants from the Department of Energy before being deployed. But the growth of microgrids—and new technologies to power them—continues.

“Progress, and technology advancement, is happening at the moment,” said Bharatkumar Solanki, an energy systems researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.