Cavendish Joins Local Towns for Solarize

The Cavendish Energy Committee has announced that the Town has joined with Reading, Brownsville, Weathersfield and Windsor to work as a team to promote residential solar power through a program called “Solarize Makes $ense”, run by the non-profit Vital Communities. The purpose of Solarize Makes $ense is to significantly ramp up the rate of solar adoption, even beyond the borders of participating communities and beyond the timeframe of the outreach campaign. Solarize accomplishes this by encouraging a very public and very positive conversation about solar energy throughout the region, and by demonstrating numerous solar success stories. The program teams up local communities with competitively chosen solar photovoltaic (PV) installers to make residential-scale solar energy more accessible and affordable for homeowners.

A meeting of interested residents is now being planned for a date in June. All Cavendish residents will be invited to participate and learn about how solar can benefit them.

Vital Communities has selected three such teams within the 69-town Vital Communities service area in the Upper Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire to participate in Round Three of the Solarize Upper Valley program. The community team will work with Vital Communities to choose their own solar PV installer partner. The selected PV installer(s) will provide, at a minimum, competitive tiered pricing (prices drop for everyone as more residents sign up), free site visits, collaboration in community outreach, and installation services. The community team and partner installer, with support from Vital Communities, will develop and implement a community outreach campaign between June and September 2015 with the goal of increasing the number of solar PV installations in each community.

Volunteer teams will collaborate on a variety of outreach approaches. Local energy committees in each town are now seeking volunteers to help. Lead volunteers for Cavendish are Peter LaBelle, who can be reached at 802-376-5648, and Mary Ormrod who can be reached at 802-226-7783.