Unitil, an electric and natural gas provider in New England, is about to build the first utility-owned solar array in New Hampshire. Its 4.9 MW in capacity – sneaking under the state’s 5 MW limit on net metering. It’s in Kingston, sufficiently remote that they’re busing people to the site for the groundbreaking; you can’t drive there.
There is legitimate debate about whether solar farms should be owned by electric utilities. On the plus side, that’s the best way to get them quickly built and connected to the grid. On the minus side, there’s fear that utilities will favor their own solar arrays and freeze out independent competition.
New Hampshire is behind our neighbors when it comes to large-scale solar, utility owned or otherwise, as this map from the US Photovoltaic Database reflects. Each dot is a solar array of 1 MW or more. There’s only one listed in NH, in Merrimack, but the list isn’t complete: A 3.3 MW array on the closed landfill in Manchester isn’t listed.
Return to the Concord Monitor