In this column, I will share stories and observations from the Isles of Shoals and beyond. Some six miles south-southeast of the mouth of the Piscataqua River, this amazing and historic place is host to a variety of interesting vessels, wildlife and people – a rest stop on the East Coast maritime highway.
Perched somewhat precariously on 43 rocky acres at the edge of the continent, Star Island’s 35 or so mostly wooden buildings have played host to thousands for over a hundred summers. The non-profit corporation that owns the Island has the following statement of its vision: “…to create on Star Island an environment that frees all who come to renew spiritually, explore matters of consequence and gain knowledge about the world as it might ideally be” – an aspiring offshore utopia, available in season, by the week.
What self-respecting romantic sailor wouldn’t want to work for a place like that? So, after cruising idly around the Shoals for decades, I accepted a job at Star Island in 2009, first as a boat captain and not much later as a manager in charge of island infrastructure. The board of directors had recently updated the strategic plan to include the goal of moving away from fossil fuels in favor of alternative energy.
As exciting as this challenge was, the prospects for success were just as daunting. Star Island is home to over 400 souls on summer nights. It serves well over 1,200 meals and consumes up to 5,000 gallons of fresh water every day. It collects rainwater for showers and laundry in an ancient 80,000-gallon brick cistern, and it treats up to 10,000 gallons per day of wastewater. The Island maintains its own fire, security and medical stations. In fact, it provides all the functions of a small town in miniature, seven miles out from the lighthouse at Kittery Point.
As we began to discuss alternative energy options with Star’s broad community, a wide range of ideas began to float across the windswept porches of the Oceanic Hotel. Solar, wind, tidal, wave, fuel cells, co-generation, geothermal, air-source heat pumps – even the mostly-theoretical Stirling engine- were considered.
With the help of a company of genius dreamers from Revolution Energy LLC, a New Hampshire solar company, we spent a year collecting data on how much energy we actually used and where, how much we wasted, and how we might reduce our demand. It became clear that conservation must be viewed as a source of energy. With island energy costs five to six times those of the mainland costs (typical on islands from Rhode Island to Maine), we had to find ways to save as much energy as possible before it made sense to replace it with alternative power.
We learned that our three biggest areas of use were the kitchen, the reverse-osmosis watermakers, and the waste-treatment plant. We replaced light bulbs, refrigerators, freezers, dishwashers, water heaters, pumps, coffee makers and the like with newer more efficient options. We added a small solar hot-water system.
We installed water-conserving toilets and fixtures, and increased the importation of cheaper water from the mainland. Most of the laundry was sent ashore for processing. New efficient diesel engines were retrofitted so that waste heat in the exhaust could heat water for the kitchen. We saved a little by adding smart-switch technology at the wastewater plant. We encouraged employees and guests to be aware of their energy use and reduce it where possible. In what I like to call an environmental hat trick, a new main kitchen dishwasher reduced water use to one-third of that of its predecessor, saving water as well as the costs of heating and treating it.
This was Phase 1, at the end of which we had saved about 30 percent of the original electrical load. With consulting assistance funded by a grant from the Island Institute, we could then begin to seriously evaluate the options for clean island energy. Proven solar and wind technologies quickly went to the top of the list.
In a brief flirtation with wave generation, we entertained an entrepreneur scientist who claimed to have developed a stationary wave generator that could be wired directly from the cove to the powerhouse. He had designed his system for swells in the North Sea. Let’s say he was a little disappointed by the average height of our Gosport waves.
As New England sailors know too well, there are many summer days on our coast when the wind doesn’t really blow very much. Wind turbines require lots of maintenance, are thought by some to be unsightly, and can be a problem for wildlife. The wind resource, while abundant most of the year, was shown by NOAA data to be unreliable in summer when we need it.
I have heard it said that Isles of Shoals became a summer resort because it is the sunniest place on the coast. I’m not sure how scientific that assessment is, but we do have lots of fine sunny days during our operating season. So solar was the clear answer: abundant, low maintenance, low profile – with proven equipment that could provide plentiful power for twenty five years or more.
The system was designed with 415 panels taking up about half an acre, and a total capacity of 135 kW (enough to power about 30 average homes). It would be the largest system in New England not connected to the power grid. Power could be stored in an 85,000-pound lead-acid battery bank with a rated capacity of 600 kW hours (kWh).
By late 2013, we were finally ready to go. But with the project costing just shy of a million dollars, financing for the system proved very difficult to come by. Still, in a last minute miracle – including federal tax credits and a slightly scaled-down system – we found investors willing to take the risk in the spring of 2014. Construction began that summer.
A crane barge brought out panels, batteries, inverters, switches, miles of heavy copper wire, and the galvanized-steel anchoring system that would be drilled into the ledge just below the surface of the island. A small army of electricians wired up the controls in the space that formerly housed the generators and boilers.
An excavator began to clear the poison ivy for the array, only to discover what might be the only spot on the Isles of Shoals where the glacier left some soil behind. In fact, in the solar field, the bedrock was as much as five feet down. The racking system needed to withstand winds over 130 knots. This system would be impossible to construct in the deep stony soil.
With the project once again in jeopardy, we had to get creative, and fast. The operational deadline for the federal tax credits was looming, and the investors were getting nervous.
A contractor estimated $100,000 for a cast-in-place ballast system. Instead, we imported 250 3,000-pound concrete waste blocks from a local batch plant at 40 dollars each. Three barge trips delivered the blocks and the equipment to set them. Tractors ran from the pier to the solar site, ferrying blocks for 10 days. A month later, the panels were in place and ready for final testing.
The tax-credit rules required that the system be operational in 2014. So, in late December, after the previous day’s attempt was thwarted by high winds, we approached the island with the commissioning engineers in four-foot breaking waves and temperatures in the 20s. Focused ahead in the last white-knuckle seconds of coming alongside, I overran some lobster gear and the engine stalled. Fortunately, the boat maintained just enough forward momentum to get a few lines over, and we got the crew ashore and up to the powerhouse safely.
A few hours later, with tests and programming completed, we shut down the generator. The powerhouse was silent but for the howling of the wind outside, and the lights were still on – for the first time without internal combustion in 100 years. Inverters hummed and flashed, and even amid the late-afternoon-gloom days before the solstice, electricity flowed freely from the panels. A new era in island energy had begun.
Jack is a USCG 100-ton master and the island manager at Star Island at the Isles of Shoals, where his boat, Aloft, lives most of the summer.
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