 All right, we're giving it just another minute before we get started. Welcome Bremen. Doretta's bread. What is that, is that a bakery or? So I meant to send that to just Ted, but his wife makes fantastic bread out of there. I hope not to give it away out of their awesome bison farm. Wow. Unbelievable, unexpected turn of events. I know we're holding our next meeting. I'm Naples and Sanford and I see 1204. So we're gonna get going. Welcome everyone to solar siting for municipalities, tools and experiences brought to you by Maine Audubon and the Maine Municipal Association. I am Nick Lund, the advocacy and outreach manager for Maine Audubon and I will be your host today. Let's get started. So Maine Audubon is working hard to protect our state's wildlife and wildlife habitat from the impacts of climate change. We know that aggressively cutting our carbon emissions from all sectors is the key to meeting strong climate goals set by the Mills Administration and that electricity from renewable sources is a major part of that. Maine Audubon has long been a supporter of renewable energy and just this month we completed installation of some solar panels at our Fields Pond Audubon Center in Holden. I see some Holden folks on today. That's near Bangor. That was done with our partners at Revision Energy. But like any new land use or development if not thoughtfully sited or operated new renewable energy development could displace wildlife habitat or otherwise unduly impact Maine's natural resources. That's why we're proud to have recently released our renewable energy siting tool, a GIS tool that provides resources for developers and decision makers to locate solar and land-based wind projects in areas that avoid or minimize negative impacts to important wildlife habitats. So today on the webinar, my colleague Sarah Haggerty, Maine Audubon's GIS manager and conservation biologist will take you through the renewable energy siting tool. And hello, Sarah. And then we will also hear from Ben Axelman, the manager of solar development at NEXAMP who will discuss other aspects of municipal solar development. Hello, Ben. A few technical pieces before we get started. I will be the moderator, obviously. The attendees, the folks joining us today, you'll be muted for the duration of the presentation. So please, if you have questions, put them in the Q&A box below. That is the two little speech bubbles down below. I know we're all Zoom experts by now but I have to go through the stuff. The Q&A box is the two little speech bubbles down below. We're gonna save all the questions for the end which just helps people get out, make sure we end on time. And if you have comments or again wanna say where you're zooming in from, please type those in the chat over on that side. So, all right. We are proud to offer this presentation today in association with the Maine Municipal Association. And now I wanna get started by turning it over to my colleague, Neil Goldberg from MMA, Neil. Great, thank you, Nick. And thank you for hosting this. I have to say MMA is truly the little brother in this presentation today. It is all Maine Audubon. So kudos to you. As well as kudos to this tool that is being presented, often all of the time I am hearing from our members, especially our smaller communities, that technical capacity is lacking on the ground level. And so this GIS tool is something that is, honestly, it's expensive. And so having access to it for your planning purposes for our municipal members is truly incredible. So happy to actually be spectating and learning about that. Thank you. But so a few updates before we get into the meat of this presentation, MMA is obviously here to support all of our municipalities and their needs. And one of the things that we are focused on at the moment is just gauging the municipal comfortability or capacity for solar energy ordinances. I'm not the best person to talk about this, but we did recently run a survey to gauge some information and we have some preliminary results that I will share. Of the municipalities that respond to our survey, about a third have community ordinances regulating solar development. Two thirds don't. What we're seeing though, is that that number is going to quickly increase. And it's largely being driven by these distributed generation projects, those solar panel projects that are under five megawatts. And there's a wide array of opinions on these projects. But generally speaking, they seem to be a slight nuisance to our members. At least these are the anecdotal comments we got from the survey. Because of the difficulty with connection, connecting to substations, the capacity at transfer stations isn't always sufficient. And finally, they're concerned for us is always the assessment value and taxes paid on, or taxes not paid on those developments. So those are some of the things that we heard from our survey. Other things that are preventing developments from going forward anecdotally are things like visual impacts, the belief that it will impact property values on abutting properties, the noise associated with it. And then there is the topic of decommissioning outdated or old panels, which I believe this group can speak to it, that there is actually a plan that's often written into those projects on how to decommission, but that there needs to maybe be some education around it. So again, just anecdotally what we heard. And by the way, a more formal report will follow in the coming weeks on not just solar ordinances, but the other topics we surveyed, climate change and forestry and the like. MMA is also sitting as a participant in two working groups that are of interest to our attendees today. The first is the distributed generation stakeholder group that was legislatively created. And the second is the agricultural solar stakeholder group. I've already kind of hit on a little bit of both of those and would be happy to talk offline about what's going on, but MMA is representing our members in those two groups. I think, again, no surprise to the group and the attendees here today, but the issue of assessment and property valuation is key in both of these groups. I think, for instance, in the agricultural solar, the discussion is, is this agricultural equipment or is this a solar energy appliance and where is that decision gonna fall? Finally, before I turn it back over, I have to always put a shout out for ARPA. The American Rescue Plan is in motion, money is hitting bank accounts, communities are making decisions and spending those funds. So if you have any questions regarding access, reporting, eligibility, please reach out to MMA, reach out to myself. We'd be happy to answer any questions. So had to get that out there. But with that said, I'm gonna trust it back over to Nick. Thank you for having us and I'm very excited. Awesome, thank you so much, Neil. It's a real honor to present with MMA today. So thanks so much. And all right, without further ado, we'll turn things over to main Audubon, Sarah Haggerty, who will take us through the renewable energy siting tool and some other things. And I'm gonna shut our video off and Sarah, take it away. Thank you, Nick. Let me see those. My presentation mode. Thanks again, Nick. Thanks, Neil, for having us here. I appreciate the opportunity to talk today about some of our solar siting tools. I'm going to run quickly through all of the tools in our toolbox, but really focus most of my slot of time on the newest one, which is the renewable energy siting tool, which is that online GIS map. As Nick mentioned, the reason that main Audubon is so involved in renewable energy is that our mission is to conserve Maine's wildlife and their habitats. And right now climate change is the most significant threat to wildlife and habitats. About a third of the plants and animals and their habitats in Maine are already being impacted. And that includes some of our most iconic Maine-based species, the moose, the loon, brook trout, puffins, things that the species that people think about when they think of Maine are already being impacted by climate change. And that's why we really support the policies to transition to a clean energy economy. And we're really trying to work hard to help achieve that goal of reaching 100% renewable energy in Maine by 2050. But we do understand that renewable energy projects, just like any project, can have impacts on those same wildlife and habitats that we are concerned about. So a couple of years ago, we did some major literature review, really looking at, well, what are the things that we should be worried about? What are the potential impacts to wildlife and their habitats of renewable energy and how can we avoid, minimize and mitigate those impacts? This report is on our website and it focuses not just on solar but also on onshore wind, offshore wind and transmission. And as Neil mentioned, right now our electric grid is pretty maxed out. We are gonna need more transmission. We just wanna make sure that it gets put in the right places and maintain the right way. But today I wanna focus really on solar because that's really starting to hit the ground in Maine very quickly. And we heard from solar developers and from planners and towns and other partners that as solar became very quickly to Maine, folks weren't quite sure what to do. How do we cite it? What do we need to think about and worry about? So we wanted to pull together some tools. And the biggest thing with solar is really about sighting. Most of those impacts can't happen because of where the project ends up sighted, how big it is, how it's maintained. So one of the first tools that we pulled together was with our partners in conservation and agriculture to think about best practices, right? Very generally speaking, what are some best practices for sighting solar in natural areas and also in agricultural areas? And then some general BMPs for solar generally. Not surprisingly, the priority should really be on disturbed and developed lands so that we're not consuming additional natural and agricultural lands, avoid the highest value wildlife habitats and the highest value agricultural lands. Stay near existing infrastructure and population centers so that we're not fragmenting additional habitats with the transmission lines and distribution lines. And we really want to see folks engaging with local communities. We wanna see municipalities and communities working together with developers so that we can get more renewable energy on the landscape but in the right places to have the least impact and so that everyone ends up happy at the end. And all of these tools are available at mainautobahn.org forward slash solar. So I'm just gonna go really quickly through them but you can peruse them at your leisure. The next piece that we pulled together as Neil actually mentioned was something to help municipalities with local ordinances. We were hearing from folks that folks didn't know where does this fit into zoning and do we need a special ordinance? And so we wanted to try and help out understanding of course that what your approach is in your locality is going to change depending on where you are. So your neighbor, your neighboring town may approach things very differently. And we really focused on site plan review and conditional use permits. And we have some draft language, some model language to use. We also have some highlighted areas to make sure that you understand specific things. Make sure you're thinking about this and thinking about that. And then we have an example table of permitting where different permitting tools can be used in different places. Always have your town council review. And again, this is just a guide. It's a model use it to suit your particular needs for your locality. And then we also worked with NRCM to try and answer some of the most frequently asked questions. Again, sort of generally speaking, general solar energy project questions about how and where solar projects are happening in Maine, some of the physical features of solar projects and then community considerations. And finally to the most exciting piece of the morning, the day is our newest tool which is the Maine Renewable Energy Sighting Tool. This is an online viewer. What I'm going to do now is try to switch over to that viewer and do a live demonstration. I do sometimes have a conflict with Zoom and the viewer which will kick me out of the viewer. So I'm hoping that won't happen if it does, I do have slides, they're just not quite as fun as actually doing the viewer. So I'm going to stop sharing and go back in. And as I say, if you put in mainautobahn.org forward slash solar, you don't have to put advocacy there, you'll come to our solar webpage. All of those tools that I mentioned are here and just with a little dropdown including a link to the Renewable Energy Sighting Tool. We have built a story map to walk you through the tool so that if you don't get everything that I say in the next 15 minutes, you can go back to this and it will help you walk through how to use the tool. It explains why we built it, some of the resources that we're concerned about and it explains how the tool works. And I wanted to use this just to show the basic premise of this is that it uses a stoplight model sort of a red, yellow, green, where green are areas that we would encourage development. These are areas that are like landfills and gravel pits and already developed areas. This is where we'd like to see development focused whether it's solar development or any other kind of development. Red areas at the other end of the spectrum are the areas we'd like to see avoided. These are rare species habitat, natural communities, wetlands, buffered streams, areas like that. This tool is not a regulatory tool. It's really just a planning tool but we're hoping that it will provide the sort of guidance that will help you get through permitting easier because you'll be avoiding the habitats that are of most concern. The yellow areas are more in between. These are areas that may require additional information from either resource agencies or other entities or there may be mitigation that's necessary. And there is overlap. So a lot of these resources are buffered resources so you may end up with a buffered stream overlapping with a buffered gravel pit. So red overlapping with green. So you really need to dive deep into what each of the layers are that are being presented. Don't simply use the visual. Make sure that you dive into the data. And we can go right to the tool from the story map. Which is what I'm gonna do. And like most online mapping tools you end up with a disclaimer at the beginning please read it the first time you go in. It's basically saying it's not a regulatory tool it's a planning tool and that we're using data that are being updated all the time. And just because you may look on the map and not see any resources there it doesn't mean there aren't resources they just aren't in the maps. Always make sure that you were talking to your natural resource agencies and others who may have helpful information. So you click okay and say okay here. The map that we come up with is the map of the state with all these orange lines and dots on it. This is the electrical infrastructure of Maine. The orange lines are the transmission lines and the dots are the substations. This is because any renewable energy project coming into Maine or being developed coming online has to tie into the grid. And so for planning renewable energy projects you have to start with where the electrical infrastructure already exists particularly for solar because they really have to be close to the grid. It's just much too expensive to build your own transmission line or distribution line. And they have to be close. So they have to be close to the existing infrastructure. On the left hand side is a panel with some buttons at the top and I'll walk you through these. The first one is an overview which explains what the tool is some of the same information that's in the story map and explains the stoplight model that we use. The next button if you hover over any of these it tells you what the button is for. This tells you about the data layers. It's just an overview. We have 35 different data layers in here and because that's so many we have lumped them together into different groupings depending on what type of data they are. So we have energy resources we have environmental resources previously developed areas, agricultural layers and then administrative boundaries like parcels and towns as well as roads. The next button that's a little folded map is your base map options. We come in with the modern antique. This is one of the simplest maps. So if it starts getting if you're playing around in the tool and it starts getting sluggish and you have one of the other maps on it might be good to switch over to modern antique. I like to jump over to imagery so you can see the background that there are a lot of different backgrounds that you can play with. The next button is the legend and this will show you what layers are turned on and visible. When you come into the tool most layers are actually turned off. There are a few layers that are turned on but you won't be able to see them until you zoom in because if you had all the layers on at this scale it would be too chaotic. You wouldn't be able to actually learn anything from it. So they are turned off until you zoom in closer. The legend shows you what is on and visible. And this last button with the lines it's a little list with a dropdown is where you get to those buckets of data with those groupings of data. So the first one is energy resources. So you can see we have the substations and the transmission lines turned on. If you click the tiny little arrow in the front it shows you what the icon is for that particular data set and then you can close it back up again. The next group is the environmental layers. You notice that most of these are grayed out. That's because they won't turn on until you zoom in close because this is a very, very busy group of data sets. And you can see that this one is actually clicked checked on but it's grayed out so you don't see anything. If we zoom in the red blobs that are the beginning with habitat focus areas here show up. If we zoom back out they disappear. So that shows you that some of them turn on as we get closer and further away. The next list is previously developed layers. These are gravel pits, landfills, superfund sites. You'll notice there are two listings for gravel pits and landfills. That's because at a scale that's further out they're presented as points. But as you zoom in the little purple ones are a person digging that's a gravel pit and the little brown ones are a little pile of dirt. It's a landfill. So as we zoom in those icons go away and they're replaced with polygons. And you can see that over here the boundaries are now no longer grayed out but the gravel pits are. So that's just a little trick to understand particularly for those two layers. Agricultural layers include prime farmland soils, soils of statewide importance and large agricultural blocks. And these are identified as parcels of five acres or more contiguous acres of cropland or 10 acres or more contiguous of pasture land. Finally the administration boundaries include parcels, public roads, counties, towns to help you navigate and roadways as well. And then the last option here is to add data. You can actually pull your own data in. No one else will see it. It will only be on your, that's on your version. You can pull from ArcGIS online. You can pull from a URL from a web service or if you have a shape file, CSV file and XML file or a KML file. You can pull those in directly. So if you have an area you're interested in or additional resources you want to look at if you've local zoning that you want to pull in you can do that right in the tool itself. So now I want to walk you through a little bit of how to use the map itself. There is a way to zoom into a town. I'm going to just jump to Subego. It's a dropdown list. You can't put in a particular address but you can go to the town. It will highlight the town. Excuse me, I'm going to turn off some of the agricultural layers. So we can see here's the boundary of the town and all that's visible right now are the focus areas from the beginning of Habitat and the gravel pit boundaries and landfill boundaries. That's all, well, ground fields are there as well. So if we zoomed into some of these areas now I'm not saying that this is where something should or shouldn't go, I'm just walking you through the tool but we're going to check out these green blobs. So the first thing we want to do is understand what this represents. So if we just click on that polygon it will tell you what it is. This is a gravel pit, a description of what that means and then comments like gravel pits can be a great place to put solar panels. If you, and also the source of the data if you notice at the top of the box it says it's one of two. So we have more than one layer that this is identifying and you can look at the next layer with this little arrow and it tells you that it's the town and it highlights what that feature is that you're now looking at. And the same is true for this little round one but this is a landfill and also the town. Now, remember most of our layers are not turned on yet but we can take a look and see what it looks like. Oh, you can see the gravel pit you can see the landfill. I'm gonna go back to the face map and maybe I want, I'm thinking that maybe this is a good place to go or maybe it isn't, I want to understand by turning on some of the other layers. You have the option in each of these buckets of these data sets to go to this list and turn on all the layers with one click. You have to give it a minute. Now, this is sometimes when it crashes on me because too many things are happening but I'm going to be very patient. You can see that we now have some of that overlap that I was talking about. Here's a green circle for a landfill but underneath it is a red polygon and there's some yellow and there's additional red. Same is true over here. So we want to understand what these are. So we would, you can either turn things on or off so you can see that one goes away and that was concerned land or you can again click that identity tool and hopefully it won't crash on me. And you get the pop-up that explains that polygon is conserved land. We have forest blocks in the background but if we understand where our landfill itself is we can see that's a little bit outside of the disturbed area for the landfill. Oh, and that's what I was afraid of. Not to worry. I will try one more and then I can go to slides but the idea is you wanna go in and make sure you examine what all those layers are because where the boundary is for the conserved land that's really just a municipal property. So maybe it's still appropriate because there's a landfill within something that's red maybe it doesn't mean it's inappropriate to be looking at that area. So we're back to our same area and maybe what I will do is turn on a couple of layers we had conserved land and forest blocks. So now there are a couple of tools here that we can use. I'm gonna put on my imagery and maybe we know that we need a certain amount of energy which requires a certain amount of area we can measure that area. We can measure distance. We can also measure an area and you can choose your the units and I'm gonna use acres and then we simply draw around the area of interest and it will calculate the acres or if you want say, oh, I meant to say in square feet it'll simply calculate the square feet. Couple of the other tools are really about gathering additional information on a particular site. I'll just do quick examples of these. The first is a quick assessment where you can identify your area of interest and it will give you information on a set of data layers that are pre identified and they will see what intersects with that. They don't have to be turned on and they don't have to be visible for this tool. For the other tool you will only get a response back for the things that are turned on and visible. You'll get an exclamation mark saying that it's not visible for the other ones. So I'm hoping that this will not crash again and let's say we're interested in this whole area and now you can see we have all of these different data sets down here. We don't have any substations in our polygon or wind projects, but we do have landfills and you get some basic information on the landfill and it shows you where that is. We also have some conserved land. Again, I don't have this on right now but it still shows me what that polygon is. It will tell you the acreage of the actual polygon not only the part that's intersected. So that's a really important thing to remember. It's the entire polygon. Same thing with forest blocks. This is a very large forest block. We're only catching a corner of it but it's still telling you that the forest block itself is over 2,000 acres. And there are additional layers to look at. Again, just what's being intersected. And rather than attempt fate, I will see what I can do with the other tool. The screening tool again is really focused on the things that you have turned on and that are visible and you can actually create a report from it. So you have different ways to identify the area of interest. You can draw an area or you can pull in your own shapefile. If you have something like that, I'm gonna just draw. I'll do that same. There we go. Shows us our area of interest and then when we click report, it starts running through all of the layers that are in here. The zeros mean I've got electric substations turned on but there aren't any in my area of interest. But I don't have wind turbines turned on and so I get an exclamation point. It's still list them but we have an exclamation point. I can now go down to the conserved lands, click on that plus and it will give me the information that it's pulling from that conserved land. I can also go up and hit the print button and this will generate, this sometimes takes a couple of minutes, this will generate an actual report, giving you a summary of all of the things that were turned on and visible and what the results were if there were acres associated with it. It's running through right now trying to build a map. It will actually give you a map of your area of interest but it also then goes through each of these features or variables that we were interested in and give you the additional information. This may take a minute so rather than spending your time on that, you can go in and play around in it. I will move out of this. So you can have that report, you can generate a PDF or you can print it out, you can include it in any other materials that you're developing. And I'm going to now move out of this and go back to PowerPoint. So I walked you through all of these tools and this is what the report would look like. You would have an actual map with the area of interest. Remember this one only identifies or analyzes the layers that are turned on invisible and a quick wrap up on the tool that's a whirlwind tour of it. Things to keep in mind. I hope you're seeing. Yeah, are you seeing? Yeah, I told you I would screw that up. Are you seeing it now? Yep. Excellent, thank you. As we were starting, I said, I'm probably going to screw this up. So this is what it would look like then. It's just a map with the area of interest. Print out with all of those features identified and any of the attributes. And that's quick overview of the tool. Things to remember about the tool. It's for planning purposes only. It's not a regulatory map. It doesn't include all the resources that may be important. We have talked to the natural resource agencies. They've seen the tool. They understand that it's out here, but please listen to them first. They have more up to date information and they can give you the guidance that you may need. The data are from a variety of sources. They're being updated all the time but at different time periods. So for example, the beginning with habitat focus areas are being worked on right now. They will be updated probably the end of this year or early next year. We will update the data in here when that happens. And we try to use datasets that are most applicable to the real world and that are consistent with other tools. So beginning with habitats, a great example. We use a lot of data from that in partnership with IF&W so that we're all seeing the same boundaries. We're all having the same understanding and having the same conservation aims across all of these different datasets. Finally, the reminder that not everything will draw until you're zoomed in and you have to turn on the datasets that you're interested in. If you turn them all on, the site will crash like we just saw. And finally, we are working on a couple of additional tools. We are gonna have a jam-packed toolbox when we're done, toolkit when we're done. Neil mentioned questions about visibility and plantings and we are working on a guide to planning native pollinator-friendly seed mixes. But also some guidance on some recommendations for shrubs and things like that that can help be visual barriers to help folks accept some of these renewable energy projects. As more wildlife-friendly solar projects get on the landscape, we're going to be working to highlight them on our website because we wanna show this can be done and how it can be done. And finally, we're working on a guide to community solar as well. And I think questions are happening at the end and I will stop sharing so we can move on. Thank you. Thank you so much, Sarah. That was excellent. Yes, please, if you have questions, I see one now down in the chat. And we wanna make sure we end on time. So I wanna turn it right over to Ben Axelman from Nextamp. Ben, take it away. Hey, everyone. Let me just share my screen. Oh, can everyone see that? Not yet. There it is, perfect. So thanks everyone for joining. My name is Ben Axelman. I'm a developer with Nextamp. We are a solar energy company that is based out of Boston and has been in business for about 12 years now. We are just to give a very quick background on who we are, what we do. We are a veteran founded solar energy company. We are a full cycle solar company. So we do our own project development, construction, financing, and then owning and operating of solar projects. We are a national developer at this point. We're based in Massachusetts, but we're now active all over the country. And we are backed by Diamond Generating Corporation, which is a subsidiary of Mitsubishi. And we've been heavily active in the main solar market, both developing and constructing kind of commercial scale community solar projects in the state. So my goal with this presentation is basically just to tell what this audience know, basically who are the companies that are developing projects in Maine? What is it that we're looking for with these projects? What is it that if a company proposes a solar project in your town, why might they have picked that spot and kind of how does the whole business side of it work because that may not be immediately apparent to people on the municipal level? So there are a number of business models that solar companies have adopted in the state and elsewhere, both residential. One is the scale of the project that you're working on. Residential typically means putting solar panels on your roof and selling power directly to the household or just installing panels and having the homeowner own them. Commercial scale is roughly what Nexamp does which are grid tied, couple megawatt size projects that are often power sold to municipalities or community solar projects. And then utility scale is typically larger projects, maybe 10 to 20 megawatts where it's tying into high voltage transmission lines and often looking to sell power out of state. There are also multiple business models around being a peer developer or an owner. A peer developer is a company that will look to develop a project and then sell it to someone else who will own and operate. And then the ownership model is, we basically make money by building and then selling power from the projects. Both are totally viable models, but an ownership model may, there are pluses and minuses to both and it's helpful to know kind of how the developer that's operating your community is looking to make money from it. And then in terms of revenue streams from these solar projects, development fees are basically what you would make by developing and flipping a solar project. Electricity and renewable energy credit sales are how the people that own and operate solar projects will make money. And then all solar projects are eligible for some federal tax credits, which you have to monetize in order to have a viable solar project. So when we're out looking for a new solar project, what is it that we're looking for? First, obviously we're looking for a site that has good solar access. So are there, are you have good Southern exposure? Are there any obstacles in the way that are going to block the access of sunlight to the property? Now, if there are trees on the site, can they be removed to allow for solar access or are there environmental restrictions, wetlands or species or anything like that that will prevent that? And if so, you have to design the project around avoiding shading impacts because obviously having shade on your panels will make it a non-viable project a lot of the time. Environmental restrictions are also critical. Similar to the siting map that we just saw, we want to avoid environmentally sensitive areas that will have permitting requirements or restrictions that may make the project impossible or more expensive to build. Tying into the grid is also very critical. Like Sarah said, these solar projects, at least especially on the commercial scale, we're looking to tie into existing grid infrastructure. We're not a utility scale, 10, 20, 30 megawatts. Solar project might be able to afford upgrading a substation or building a new transmission line, but most of the projects that are being developed in the state now are requiring access to the existing grid infrastructure to be viable. So finding a site where you don't have to have massive transmission upgrades to tie in is critical. Constructability also very important. We can build, we typically look for pretty flat sites. The higher, if you're looking at very rocky terrain, building on the side of a hill, ledge that can drive up the cost of construction significantly and make it so that the project is no longer viable. And then lastly, which is more of a qualitative thing is compatibility with existing land use. We're looking for sites that are either, obviously the best case here is working on a capped landfill or an old gravel pit or something like that, but absent that, are you in line with the land use of the community or you don't wanna build a site that is immediately next to say a subdivision and having a lot of residential neighbors. You don't want to do it in a place that's going to be very visible next to some scenic resources. So those are things to consider when you're picking a site and also when you're looking to regulate solar as a lot of the communities here are. So what goes into one of these solar projects? Site control is basically the first thing that we have to do is get the permission from whoever owns the property to build a solar project there. That's often in the form of a lease agreement. Sometimes it's a land purchase where it will purchase the property once the project is approved. But yeah, we need to basically have permission from whoever owns the property to build it. And that's the case for rooftop projects as well. We need to obtain permits from the town and often from the state as well. If you're over 20 acres of land disturbance that triggers a slow to permit. If you have any wetlands on site that can trigger state level wetland permitting. There are also some federal permits that can be triggered often through the Army Corps. The interconnection process is also something that we have to go. We have to get permission from CMP or Versailles to tie into the grid. And then we have to find people who are going to pay us money for the electricity or net energy billing credits generated by the project. And then we need to often enter into a tax agreement or figure out how the project is going to be taxed, which I'll speak to in a second. On the site control side, we are looking for either a purchase option or a lease typically. We require that the land have a clean chain of titles so that we can guarantee that when we build this project we actually are signing a lease with the person who actually owns it. And there aren't other entities that may have some rights on the property. If there are, we have to work through those and make sure that everything is clear so that we can fund it. And then basically how these leases work. We have typically a couple of years to go out and try to develop the project. If we're successful that triggers a construction period and then the project will operate for typically 20 to 40 years. And then we'll have requirements in there for decommissioning the project as well. On the permitting side, we are subject to whatever ordinances the town puts in place. Maine is a home rule state, so towns can kind of regulate solar in any way that they see fit. So we have to get smart about what that process is and then adhere to it. Often this involves getting a special permit or site plan review through the planning board. And in some cases the CBA, but usually it's a planning board. And then we trigger, there are some triggers that we might hit for some state level or federal permitting. And then if you're building a rooftop project, often that only requires pulling a building an electrical permit. On the interconnection side, basically roughly how this process works, we submit an application to the utility saying, hey, we wanna tie two megawatts of power into this line at this location. The utility will complete a study to determine whether there are any impacts to the system of putting that much power on the grid, which can be impacted by, how much load is already on the line? Are there existing generators, solar or wind already on this circuit? And then they will come back with a list of required upgrades that you have to do in order to tie the project into the grid. And so the way that this works is that they can't tell you that you can't interconnect, but they can come back with a cost to interconnect that makes the project cost prohibitive. So they might say, oh, in order to tie in a solar project at this location because there are so many other solar projects proposed in this area, you would need to replace a transformer at this substation for $5 million. And in that case, the solar project is probably not going to be viable. So that's kind of the balancing act that we're working with here. And then ultimately that leads to an interconnection agreement where we agree to pay the cost of those upgrades, the utility completes the upgrades and then once those are completed, they let you turn the project on. Power sales are obviously also a critical aspect of this. We, the way that we make money is by generating electricity and having them typically by participating in the net energy billing program, generating any B credits that we will then sell to either commercial off-takers that have good credit ratings that we can finance off of or community solar customers where we will sell power to individual households at a discount. And they will agree to pay us for the cost of those credits every month. Different companies structure this differently but community solar has been a big part of solar in Maine and I'm sure that some of you have seen different advertisements or flyers for that. So I'm happy to answer any questions that people might have about community solar programs but that's a lot of the solar products in Maine are being financed that way. And yeah, that's just a high level overview of who the companies are that are active in Maine and what kind of considerations we're looking for but happy to answer specific questions during the Q&A. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much, Ben. And let's bring everybody back if we can and I'm gonna try to avoid coughing with my sore throat and I'd love to take some questions. So if you all have questions and wanna put them in the Q&A box down below that would be great. I know Sarah, do you wanna go over any of the questions that you've answered already? She's been tackling some of them with her text but maybe there are some that she wants to share with a larger group. Sure, well, I'll run through them because some folks may have the same questions. The first question is a great one who is expected to be using this? Do you have to be a GIS professional or is this really for town managers? We are hoping that this is a tool that's usable for anyone. We're hoping that it was built in in such a way that it's easy enough to use especially with the story map that we've built that can walk you through some of those slightly more complicated pieces like those reporting tools at the end. You should not have to be a GIS professional and it is brand new. So we would love to hear feedback both on ease of use problems you're having, additional layers you might wanna see and things like that. We're hoping that developers use it, town managers and just interested landowners, anyone who's interested. And then the follow up question is how patient do you need to be to get that report to come up? That really depends on your two things, your connection and what time of day it is oddly enough. This tool uses a lot of public datasets and it sort of in GIS circles understood that anything that is accessing those base maps or any other public datasets are best accessed before everyone in the country is online trying to access them. So you do it sort of before nine or after eight PM at least before noon. The worst time is gonna be in the afternoon right around 12 to one is gonna be when most people are online. So timing can make a difference as well. And then there was a question on whether the tool identifies a protected areas by name and owner. We have scrubbed most of the attributes from the datasets but they are, except for some of the beginning with habitat datasets some of those natural resource datasets most of the other datasets are public and so they're publicly available. You can find that information on the original datasets but we've removed a lot of the attributes just to make it simpler as opposed to trying to cover trying to make it difficult to find that information. And the last one that I will jump on is the status of citing solar rays on parking lots. This is a great idea and we hear this a lot why aren't we just doing parking lots and buildings and I will let Ben jump in on that one too but there's been a lot of research looking into that and the costs are really, really fairly prohibitive in terms of maintaining renewable energy at affordable prices. Some corporations and individual industries are doing that on their own properties and that's a fantastic place to start and maybe as we get more efficiencies we'll see it elsewhere. I don't know if Ben has other thoughts on that. Yeah, I mean, I think cost is the biggest issue there. You can get close to normal ground mounted cost not you can't quite get there you can get in the same ballpark if you're building at scale but you need a pretty large parking lot in order to get there for one off filling a smaller parking lot with solar panels it's pretty expensive. We've done a number of carport projects in Massachusetts and some other places but in those cases, the state is subsidizing it. The incentive program has a specific carve out for canopy structures and nothing like that exists in Maine at the moment. So I think that it's a great idea and I think it will probably I think you'll see carports get built in Maine eventually but not quite yet unless if there's no incentive program then you will probably just take a little bit longer for the cost to come down some more. Also as solar gets built out in rural areas and the cost of tying to the grid there goes up parking lot areas are usually in areas where there isn't a lot of other open land to do solar. So you may see the cost of tying to the grid be relatively cheap there and some parking structures get built but it's a great idea and they're certainly viable but the cost is the largest driver. And there's a related question for you in the Q&A here about the reaction you've had from trying to build solar near neighborhoods. From one way to look at it is that places that are close to disturbed land or already disturbed are great places. What's the reaction from neighborhoods when you try to build nearby? It depends. I think that a lot of it depends on what the land was used for before. If it was a pristine natural habitat people may object to cutting that down and building a solar farm if you're talking about an old gravel pit or a landfill near residences people will probably be more open to that. I think typically the concern that people have about solar is mostly related to viewshed. Am I gonna see the solar panel? How far away is it from my house? How far away is it from the road? Are there gonna be screening in place? Wind energy has a number of negative externalities that makes noise, it casts shadow, things like that. Solar doesn't really have any of that. Just the view is typically the largest concern. I think solar panels are beautiful and I would be happy to live next to a solar field but not everyone feels that way. Finding a way to place it in a place where it's less of a visual impact is usually what people are looking for. If it's in your neighborhood but it's on an old landfill and you've got some screening then sure. I'm clear cutting 20 acres and putting panels right next to your house and people will be upset about that. There's one thing I've learned from buying a house in the last couple of years is that neighbors aren't happy with anything you do. Yeah. Guy told me my shutters didn't look good. Another question in the chat about question one on the upcoming election in Maine. Part of question one would require two thirds approval of the legislature for transmission lines across transmission lines for solar projects across state-owned lands. Sarah, do you have any insight into that? I think that we do need to think really hard about transmission lines. So right now, and Nick maybe you can make sure that I'm on track here. The activities that happen on state lands if they're going to have a big impact have to go in front of the legislature for that two thirds approval. There's a question about whether something like a transmission line would have to, the courts seem to feel that that is the case. There's another piece of question one about the legislature being required for two thirds approval for any significant transmission lines. That's over 50 miles and 375 kV. And we really need to think hard about that because we do need transmission. That is the electrical infrastructure in Maine is pretty old and pretty much full already. And so there are estimates that we may need between three and five times the transmission capacity that we have right now if we're gonna meet that 100% renewable energy goal by 2050. So we do wanna make sure that we are able to get enough transmission on the landscape and do it in a reasonable responsible way. I think that would be my thought. Yeah, and I don't have much to add. I see we're at the one hour mark, but I will put in the chat, Maine Audubon, we just released some information about question one, just a lot of sort of feeling out the questions and allowing people to get some more info. So take a look there if you'd like to see our position more in depth. Anything to add, Ben, on that? No, I mean, I think that, you know, this is kind of out of my wheelhouse, but I think, yeah, for sure. I mean, I think, you know, your transmission needs should be, like we'll probably need some, but needs to be done in a way that minimizes impact to, you know, to the natural environment and natural resources and also, you know, is really necessary and will help with the climate. So I'll leave it there. Well, I see that we are coming in right on time. There are no more questions in the chat. I wanted to follow up very quickly with something that Neil mentioned at the top about decommissioning plans. Maine Audubon supported a great law that was passed, this past legislative session that requires decommissioning plans for projects over three acres. That law took effect yesterday and it applies to projects that were initiated after October 1st of this year. So yes, decommissioning plans are a part of the future for solar projects in Maine. So that's all we have. I want to thank Sarah Hagerty. I want to thank Ben Axelman. I want to thank Neil Goldberg and Maine Municipal Association for having us on today. And I want to wish everyone a great rest of your week. All right. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Take care, everyone. See you later.