Aquinnah is one step away from qualifying for up to $1 million in state funds, a valuable resource for a planned microgrid for town offices as well as upgrades to electric vehicle chargers.
Town officials say the projects would help their community in the event of a grid failure, and would help officials do their part to transition to renewable energy.
To qualify for the funding, Aquinnah must first complete six steps, of which just one remains — creating and adopting a decarbonization plan on how their town would eliminate fossil fuel use from its town buildings.
Bill Lake, the chair of the Aquinnah’s climate and energy committee, briefed the select board earlier this month on what the town would need to do to qualify.
The funding, from Massachusetts’ Green Communities program, builds on a designation that most towns in the state received several years ago when they qualified as green communities.
The program, from the state Department of Energy Resources, supports municipalities that pledge to cut their energy use and meet criteria in the Green Communities Act.
That first generation of the program provided Aquinnah with a modest grant, he said, but the second generation offered up to $1 million for municipalities that qualify as “Climate Leader Communities.”
He told The Times on Thursday that Aquinnah has already made good progress on the final step, as town buildings primarily rely on heat pumps, with some remaining uses of propane.
“We’re mostly there at this point,” he said.
The microgrid for Aquinnah’s town buildings would be a key resource in the event of an emergency, supplying energy for the town hall, town offices, and fire and police buildings on State Road.
Lake told The Times that he is not aware of a timeline for the microgrid project, but that he hopes Aquinnah will receive its climate leader designation in the first half of this year.
The project would involve installing solar facilities and a battery backup, as well as wiring the buildings together. “If the state grid goes down, you can operate your buildings as a microgrid, using battery and solar to keep your operations going when the larger grid goes down,” Lake said.
“The principal interest is resilience,” he also said. “With the increase of serious weather events, we are concerned that if there is an outage on the grid, town hall is supposed to be a warming shelter, and we want to keep police and fire departments going.”
A microgrid project would cost the town around $700,000, according to consultants at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. The lab has been working with Aquinnah and neighboring Chilmark for two years, Lake said, to envision microgrid projects for each of their town halls.
Aquinnah could pay for the project itself with state funding, Lake said, or put out a request for proposals to a developer who would build the microgrid and sell its energy to the town at a discount.
The town completed its second-to-last step toward qualifying at its select board meeting on Feb. 11. Select board members voted unanimously to prioritize using electric vehicles for town purposes, not counting heavy-duty vehicles such as fire engines. The town would also not have to buy any electric vehicles that are not commercially available, or inappropriate for their needs.
Lake added at that meeting that the state funding could help the town purchase a fast charger for electric vehicles, that could charge a vehicle such as a Ford Lightning in an hour or less.
“We very much want to install a level-three DC fast charger,” he said at the meeting.
“I think if you’re going to really keep going with an electric fleet, you need one of these fast chargers,” he added.
