Under cloudy skies, the town of Jaffrey and ReVision Energy cut the ribbon on a new, 1.34 megawatt solar array.
The project, the first of its kind in New Hampshire, will support 250 low- and moderate-income families in the region and stands to become a blueprint for the rest of the state.
It’s part of the Low-Moderate Income Community Solar Program, established in 2022 under the state’s Department of Energy, which will help families access from this solar array and future projects across the state.
Sam Evans-Brown, the executive director of Clean Energy New Hampshire, helped craft the bill that created the program and said this is the first step in a long road. Bureaucratic foot-dragging, he added, contributed to the Jaffrey array being the first to come online to support the program since it was created four years ago.
The array will support 250 families who have enrolled in the program, with priority given to Jaffrey residents, then to surrounding towns, and the rest randomly selected.
The selected families will receive a 25% reduction in the supply portion of their bill. Over the lifetime of the array — 40-plus years — it will result in about $2 million in bill credits.
“It’s incredibly exciting to see this happening,” said Evans-Brown. “The clean energy transition and affordability agenda really ought to be the same agenda. But if you are low-income and don’t have access to capital or can’t get a loan, you can’t get rooftop solar, and you can’t have access to these technologies that can save folks who have more income tons of money.”
Programs like this one help level that playing field, said Evans-Brown.
Even as a first for the state, it’s been a long road for Jaffrey to get to this point, said Town Manager Jon Frederick. The town has considered a solar array at this site, on top of the town’s capped landfill, for nearly two decades as a way to make the unbuildable land useful. He said the solar array was built because of “persistence and a commitment to a vision” by town staff and elected officials over the years.
Construction is complete, and the array is expected to come online by the end of the year.
The project, a public-private partnership, was financed by Blue Haven Solar, a solar financing entity of Blue Haven Initiative, a family office that invests in projects that have a positive social and environmental impact.
The solar array consists of 2,266 solar panels and was built by ReVision Energy, a New England-based company which is leasing the land from the town of Jaffrey. It is expected to generate more than 1.7 million kilowatt-hours of renewable electricity annually and offset approximately 933 tons of carbon emissions each year.
Evans-Brown said while the Jaffrey array is a good start, it’s a drop in the bucket. While this project will only serve 250 people, he said, there are roughly 11,000 people in the state enrolled in the Low-Moderate-Income Community Solar Program.
Congresswoman Maggie Goodlander attended the ribbon-cutting and said the array was a representation of a cross-section of economic development, fighting the climate crisis, and lowering costs.
“They can all be done together with projects like this,” said Goodlander.
It represents a “perfect use of land” for Jaffrey, she added.
“It’s so exciting to me to see what you’ve built here. The resilience, the commitment to what I think is responsible self-government at its best. You’ve put to perfect use the assets of this town,” said Goodlander. “I think about the 250 families this project is going to be helping, the hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of dollars this project is going to save. What a wonderful thing you’ve built here. What an inspiration to the rest of the state.”
