Maine police are looking for the people who plowed a construction vehicle through a nearly completed community solar farm, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage.
The incident happened late June 30 at the Novel Energy Solutions community solar farm in New Gloucester, the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office reported. It was discovered around 7 a.m. the next day.
Community news page NGXchange described the facility as a 975-kW array and reported it was approved by the town Planning Board in 2022. It sits on 10 acres in a rural area of fields, woods and houses, north of Portland and just east of the Maine Turnpike.
Minnesota-based Novel Energy Solutions could not be reached for comment.
Portland news station WMTW TV interviewed assistant construction manager Cody Ellich, who said a skid steer was used to smash panels, damage frames and flip over a trailer.
Two skid steers are visible in the WMTW footage, one of them sitting frozen mid-crunch amid a row of panels, wrapped in a tangle of wires from the solar array.
“Luckily the skid steer malfunctioned on them. It looks like they were in the middle of causing absolute [mayhem] and it just shut down on them,” Ellich said.
There were no security cameras on site.
The Sheriff’s Department said preliminary estimates placed damages at several hundred thousand dollars.
Solar farms are not universally popular, and NGXchange reported some local opposition to the Novel Energy proposal.
Online, there was no shortage of opinions in comments on Facebook posts by the Sheriff’s Office and WMTW.
Some who commented criticized the destruction of property, while others seemed not upset by the news, and some came right out and cheered.
One commenter even compared the perpetrators to Marvin “Killdozer” Heemeyer, who attained folk hero status in some circles by building an armor-plated bulldozer and using it to level 13 buildings associated with people he held a grudge against in a small Colorado town 20 years ago.
While some people hold a similar dislike for solar farms, the damage wrought upon them most commonly is the result of severe weather rather than vandalism.
A 2020 NREL report based on 15,128 property-casualty insurance claims over the preceding six years showed theft and vandalism at the root of not quite 1% of claims, while hailstones accounted for nearly 53%.
