A solar garden grows - Harvard residents develop communal solar project | CommonWealth

WORTH ROBBINS IS like a lot of Massachusetts residents. He always wanted to put solar panels on his roof in Harvard, but he discovered that trees on his property and his neighbor’s property blocked out a lot of the sunlight. Instead of cutting the trees down or abandoning his solar dream, Robbins and a number of other residents in the central Massachusetts town who were facing the same dilemma banded together to do something novel: they built a $1.7 million solar garden that formally opens this week. 

A solar garden is a lot like a community garden but with solar panels producing electricity instead of plants producing vegetables. Electrons are produced, fed into the grid, and the money collected for the power is then used to offset the electricity bills of the garden’s owners. The Harvard solar garden has 47 owners – 43 households and four businesses. 

Read more:  http://www.commonwealthmagazine.org/Voices/Back-Story/2014/Spring/012-A-solar-garden-grows.aspx