Lighthouses are navigational aids for ships traversing the rocky coastlines, sandbars, and reefs of the sea. They signal safety and potential hazards, offering a guiding light to sailors.
Maine, known for more than 60 lighthouses dotting its beautiful coastline, is acting as a guiding light to the rest of the United States, but not in maritime activities. It’s leading the way in a new frontier — renewable energy supply.
Eastport, Maine, in the easternmost part of the country, is exploring a new type of microgrid — a small, independent electrical network that can generate power on-site when needed most. According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), microgrids act as “a single controllable entity” version of a larger electrical grid, sharing and distributing energy.
Photo Courtesy Maine
With recent climate-related shifts, the town of about 1,300 residents has experienced more frequent and intense storms, which have caused power outages. Fast Company reported that the city runs on “a single cable straddling the rough waters” for its electricity, causing persistent power interruptions.
Photo Courtesy U.S. Department of Energy
“As the threats of climate change grow more severe, it is essential that communities across the country make investments in clean, resilient infrastructure,” Maine Senators Susan Collins and Angus King said in a 2021 statement.
To address this issue of power resiliency head-on, the Eastport community is developing a proposed microgrid that combines solar panels, batteries, and a generator that uses a source unique to the island — its powerful tides — to store enough power to last for four hours.
This setup is innovative as most microgrids are usually powered by traditional gasoline or diesel generators, not renewable sources like solar or hydropower.
Video Courtesy U.S. Department of Energy
“This site off of Eastport is one of the best sites in the country for tidal power,” Stuart Davies, the CEO of the Ocean Renewable Power Company, which develops tidal and river power turbines, told Inside Climate News.
In 2021, the DOE awarded Eastport an Energy Transitions Initiative Partnership Project grant, a program that funds projects that help establish localized energy generation and storage. The city has been using the financing — along with other grants, including $200,000 awarded in September 2024 in the second round of funding through the DOE’s Energizing Rural Communities Prize — for its proposal. The Inflation Reduction Act is a funding source for the prize.
Photo Courtesy American Made Challenges
Eastport’s initiative aligns with the DOE’s Microgrid Program Strategy, which started around December 2020. By 2035, the agency envisions microgrids as “essential building blocks of the future electricity delivery system to support resilience, decarbonization, and affordability.”
“The fact that there are all of these different grants and loans available within the Inflation Reduction Act definitely helps the business case for these projects,” Michael Liebman, a manager at the clean energy think tank Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), told Fast Company.
Eastport is not the only city in the U.S. exploring microgrids as a solution to power vulnerability in their communities. Wood Mackenzie, an energy consultancy headquartered in Scotland, found microgrid installations reached 8.6 gigawatts in the U.S. by the end of 2023, setting the annual growth rate of new projects at 32%.
Photo Courtesy Wood Magazine
In parts of the Carolinas, where floods ravaged towns and roadways after Hurricane Helene, these technologies may be more cost-effective investments than in the past. RMI found that battery prices fell 79% from 2013 to 2023.
An example of the growing microgrid trend can be found in Duke Energy’s microgrid in Hot Springs, North Carolina, which helped the rural town recover power after Category 4 Hurricane Helene hit it in October 2024.
“This project has reduced the need for equipment upgrades in an environmentally sensitive area,” Jason Handley, general manager of Duke’s Distributed Energy Group, said in a statement. “We are using lessons learned from this first-of-its-kind installation to take to our other microgrids under construction in Indiana and Florida. At a larger scale, microgrids bring more resiliency to the energy grid for our customers.”