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 officials, environmentalists, business owners and others to make introductions and swap ideas about how to launch small-scale wind power.

“The simplest model is selling to a farm or a business,” said Josh Groleau, chief executive officer of Pecos Wind Power, an early-stage wind turbine manufacturer developing an 85-kilowatt distributed wind turbine.

He received a $152,000 federal agricultural grant last year to help Maine farmers and rural small businesses that want to use distributed wind power apply for federal grants. He’ll assess the feasibility of potential projects, prepare technical reports and permitting, and plan construction and other details. Studies will help determine if farms can reduce the cost of electricity with onsite wind power.

“We can hopefully keep them farming,” Groleau said. “We think there’s pretty good alignment.”

FARMS A NATURAL SITE FOR SMALL WIND PROJECTS

Greater investment by the government and private sector boosted solar for years, said Mike Bergey, president of the Distributed Wind Energy Association. In addition, overbuilding of solar equipment mega-factories by the Chinese government in the early 2000s led to overproduction and a sharp drop in prices, erasing any cost advantage enjoyed by small wind producers, he said.

In addition, solar “goes places wind can’t,” such as on rooftops, while even small wind towers are barred from most suburban settings, Bergey said.

Hampson said the federal Agriculture and Energy departments are partnering in a national initiative to establish renewable energy systems to help farmers generate income by selling excess wind power and reducing electricity bills.

Farms are a natural site for small-scale wind projects. The open spaces and a need by farmers to diversify their incomes have invited solar developers to seek business arrangements establishing solar arrays.

“The primary market is rural farms of all types and rural small businesses,” said Bergey, president of a wind power manufacturer in Norman, Oklahoma.

A wind power system, which he said can cost $50,000 to a couple of hundred thousand dollars to set up, uses less space than solar arrays and helps farmers avoid taking land out of production. Distributive wind systems of up to 1 megawatt are “really growing,” Bergey said.

Portsmouth High School in Rhode Island uses electricity from this 1.5-megawatt turbine to meet its energy needs. The town and local YMCA also get power from the turbine installed in August 2016. Photo by Sarah Gates

Small wind turbines have capacities of up to 100 kW, midsized wind turbines are between 101 kW and 1 MW and large wind turbines have a capacity of greater than 1 MW, according to the Department of Energy.

Tyler Adkins, co-founder of the Maine Community Power Cooperative, a solar generator, warned of lengthy grid review processes to connect wind power projects to the New England electricity grid. “It’s a concern,” he said.

Many solar projects are stalled in lengthy grid connection studies, leading to complaints from developers that they may miss deadlines to qualify for ratepayer subsidies.

Adkins also questioned whether a workforce exists in sufficient numbers to maintain wind power systems that require repairs of their many parts. And wind power, he said, is less predictable than solar energy.

Groleau said wind power could run into grid connection challenges. But it has a different “generation profile” than solar, which drops off at night. Wind can “pick up the slack,” he said, even if it can’t be counted on to do so consistently.

BEGINNING AS ‘PARALLEL TECHNOLOGIES’

About 15,000 distributed wind energy businesses operate nationally, Bergey said. Many begin as “parallel technologies” such as manufacturers of electric motors and generators or are “shallow pocket startups” founded with venture capital funding or money from the federal government, Bergey said.

An example of a residential wind turbine that provides power to a home and helps offset electricity costs. Photo by Ketter Ulrich, Primus WindPower

“There’s no Tesla, Apple, or a major company in this space,” he said. “We’ll probably have to grow some before that happens.”

The Inflation Reduction Act, the federal law signed by President Biden two years ago that provides hundreds of billions of dollars for clean energy projects, includes a tax credit of up to 30% for wind energy projects. It also provides $2 billion for grants and loans to farmers and rural small businesses to install clean energy projects, including distributed wind.

In addition, $300 million is available for “under-utilized technology” that includes wind energy projects, said Patrick Gilman, a program manager and distributed wind lead at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Wind Energy Technology Office.

The industry has faced headwinds in the past decade. Since 2012, when 31 small wind turbine manufacturers reported U.S. sales, the number of small wind turbine manufacturers operating and participating in the U.S. market has declined, the U.S. Department of Energy reported.

Some small wind manufacturers do not have consistent sales from year to year and others go out of business, the agency said. Some, particularly foreign manufacturers, focus on countries with more supportive policies, and other factors include an “unstable policy environment” in the U.S. and competition from the solar industry, it said.