Solar farm planned for Dover-Foxcroft site
By Ernie Clark, Bangor Daily News Staff
A solar farm to be built on 18.2 acres of leased land off West Main Street in Dover-Foxcroft is expected to be completed by this fall.
The project received the unanimous support of the town’s planning board earlier this month, and Chris Byers of Boyle Associates in Portland, an environmental consulting firm representing developer Aypa Power, said construction likely would begin in May or June and take approximately four months.
When completed the array will have 8,050 solar panels, with the 3-megawatt solar farm producing enough electricity to power the equivalent of approximately 475 homes.
Construction costs are estimated at nearly $5 million.
Byers said there is an agreement between the project developers and Central Maine Power — which serves the Dover-Foxcroft area — to interject the electricity generated by the solar farm onto the power grid.
Whether that power ultimately will be sold to residential or non-residential (businesses, municipalities or other commercial accounts) has not yet been determined, but it will be consumed within the state.
“The power will benefit Mainers,” Byers said. “Whether residential or non-residential the power has to stay in Maine per state law [LD 1711] that was passed in 2019.”
The solar farm will be located behind Shaw’s supermarket on the northbound side of West Main Street, or Route 15, on property zoned commercial/rural residential. The entrance to the solar farm will be situated across the road from Dunkin’ Donuts on the west end of the property.
“The reason I liked this siting was because it made use of the back of this lot that the planning board and others were trying to figure out what to do with being zoned rural residential and commercial,” Byers said.
Byers said approximately 370 feet of road frontage was preserved for potential future commercial use.
“What we were able to do was to get the best of both worlds by preserving road frontage on that lot for future commercial development as it was intended when they did their town plan and zoning.” he said. “But we also have provided a bonus use of this lot by building a solar project in the rear.
“We haven’t taken away the ability for a commercial business to be built there.”
This will mark the first solar array in Dover-Foxcroft but not the first in Piscataquis County. One such project located on nearly 100 acres at the Eastern Piscataquis Industrial Park in Milo is nearing completion and will produce enough electricity to power the equivalent of 5,430 homes, according to developers.
Byers said the current project in Dover-Foxcroft has been in the works for about a year, and represents another example of the growing solar farm industry in Maine.
“We as a group are permitting approximately 70 projects around the state and we’re just one consulting group,” Byers said, who also predicted a lot of solar farm construction in Maine in 2021 and 2022.
“These projects are popping up all across Maine. Because we have a fairly spread-out state with substations, the solar projects are really spread out.”