A Coastal Maine Town’s Investment in Energy Reliability

Brooklin sits at the southern tip of Maine’s Blue Hill Peninsula, surrounded by water on three sides and connected to the mainland by roads that cross saltwater bridges. Much of the town’s development is concentrated along the shoreline, where increasingly frequent and severe coastal storms threaten reliable access to power. 

The US’s Easternmost City Could Be a Model for the Country’s Renewable Future

In 2021, the city of Eastport, with support from Island Institute, was awarded an Energy Transitions Initiative Partnership Project grant from the Department of Energy with , which funded work to develop localized energy generation and storage.

Now, a community-driven initiative is developing solar and tidal power to feed a microgrid. It would allow the island community to weather hours of outages, detached from the main electrical grid without the high costs and carbon footprint of diesel. The grant launched the feasibility studies and produced the plans for the transition that Eastport is in the middle of building out.