COOP HISTORY AND ENERGY SOURCES
In 1915 the privately owned Vinalhaven Light and Power Company started operating, selling electricity to Vinalhaven subscribers. Its coal-fired electric generation plant stood on the western shore of Carver's Harbor at the site of the Fishermen's parking lot. The plant cost $80,000 to construct. It had dock space for 300 tons of coal, a power-line grid of about 5.5 miles, and two 212 h.p. steam engines that turned two electric generators for a total output of 400 Kilo-Watts. The subscribers to the new Vinalhaven electric service were the town for street lights and offices, an assortment of businesses, and 171 residences. The oil lamps that had lit the island's homes and businesses were replaced by Thomas Edison's "Mazda" incandescent electric light bulbs. For many years there was no need to run the generators all night, so to save the cost of burning fuel, the plant was shut down in the middle of the night and restarted in the early morning. In 1919 the Vinalhaven electric grid was expanded across the Fox Islands Thorofare to North Haven island using a submarine cable .
In the mid-1920's, the plant was converted from coal to diesel-powered generators. Older folks can still remember the loud noise the diesel engines made powering the electric generators. The noise reverberated all over the village of Vinalhaven. In the 1960's the old plant and grid no longer had the capacity to meet the needs of the growing islands' communities' demand for elctricity. A time-share arrangement was implemented whereby half the customers got electricity while the other half of the subscribers had no electricity. Several times during the day electricity was switched back and forth between two different sections of the islands. This agrangemnt continued until 1976.
In 1975, the antiquated private electric company went out of business. The communities of Vinalhaven and North Haven joined together and created the Fox Islands Electric Cooperative (FIEC). In 1976, the Coop retired the Vinalhaven power plant and laid a submarine cable across the bottom of Penobscot Bay from the mainland to the islands. Since this original submarine cable wasn't buried in the bay, it was prone to outages caused by abrasions due to tidal currents and to boats catching the cable with their anchors.
In 2005 the 29-year-old original submarine cable to the mainland was retired and a new submarine cable installed. The new submarine cable is 9.9 mile long (16 Km) and unlike the first cable is buried six feet deep in the mud of Penobscot Bay. On the mainland the cable begins at a connection point to the Maine Central Power grid, then leaves the mainland at Clam Cove, Rockport and runs out under the bay to North Haven Island. The new cable has 3 copper 1/2 inch diameter conduits and 24 optical fibers. The cable is rated for a maximum capacity of 372 amperes at 59,000 volts.
In the early 2000s, the Vinalhaven and North Haven communities decided to explore the wind energy resources on the islands. In 2009, Fox Islands Wind, LLC installed a small, renewable green-energy wind farm consisting of three 1.5 MW wind generators on Vinalhaven island. The wind farm was sized to produce approximately 10 MWHs annually, most of which is purchased by Fox Islands Electric Cooperative through Vermont Public Power Supply Authority and used by the two island communities.
In the first ten years of operation, Fox Islands Wind’s turbines have prevented approximately 54 tons of CO2 emissions from entering our planet’s atmosphere by replacing fossil fuels with clean wind generation.
The Coop's Parameters
The Coop's total meters installed: 2,064.
Total energized lines: 187 miles
Submarine cable from mainland to the islands: 9.9 miles
Subsidiary: Fox Islands Wind (Fully owned)
The Coop total annul electric power sales: 11,046 Meg-a-Watt hour's (MWh).
The Coop's annual MWh growth rate has been 1.3%.
The Coop's busy season: July and August
Coop's 2019 Sourses of Electrical Power
Mainland New England 2019 Sourses of Electrical Power
