Green Mountain Power (GMP) will use two of its pending order of 500 Tesla Powerwall home energy storage systems to build a solar-plus-storage facility at Vermont’s Emerald Lake State Park, a GMP spokesperson said on Sept. 4.
The new solar-plus-storage system will allow GMP to take the state park off the grid and retire an existing half-mile electric distribution line that currently serves the park, GMP said in a Sept. 2 statement.
“Emerald Lake State Park is a great example to Vermonters, and the thousands of visitors to the park each year, of what our energy future will look like,” GMP CEO Mary Powell said in the statement. “This project will show how we can provide cost-effective power that is clean and highly reliable, while being generated closer to home.”
GMP in May announced it would begin offering the Powerwall to customers, with the initial rollout scheduled to begin in October in Rutland, Vt. Telsa CEO Elon Musk on May 1 officially announced Telsa would enter the home energy storage market with the release of 10 kWh and 7 kWh versions of the lithium-ion Powerwall batteries.
According to GMP’s spokesperson, the company’s current proposal for the state park solar-plus-storage facility will use two Powerwalls, and GMP will adjust the proposal as needed moving forward. For the project, GMP plans to install nearly 10 kW of solar, she said.
GMP said that the cost to install the solar-plus-storage system will be about 20% less than the cost to rebuild the existing electric distribution line to Emerald Lake State Park. Construction on the project will begin next spring, the company said.
