BLUE HILL — The next time Maine endures a catastrophic ice storm, the lights will be burning brightly within the 11 homes being planned for Pond House Trail.

The upscale homes within the new, 18-acre housing development that is now taking shape off Morgan Bay Road in East Blue Hill have been engineered to rely heavily on solar energy.

Although all 11 homes planned will be tied into the Bangor Hydro-Electric grid, they will largely draw their power from an on-site array of solar collectors that convert sunlight into electricity. Should both power sources ever fail simultaneously, generators take over.

The 11 upscale homes being planned for the new Pond House Trail subdivision in East Blue Hill will rely heavily on solar energy in meeting the electricity and domestic hot water needs of residents. When the sun’s not shining, the homes will draw power from the Bangor Hydro grid. When it is, the subdivision’s solar photo voltaic array will, in effect, “sell” any excess electricity to Bangor Hydro, generating credits that can be used by homeowners to minimize fees for required grid usage.—PHOTO COURTESY OF NIELSEN VAN DUIJN

Of the six houses already built, four have been purchased and await connection to a communal solar array that has been designed but is not yet installed. Van Duijn said his research showed solar energy was a more reliable and more affordable alternative energy option than a wind turbine capable of meeting the electrical needs of 11 large homes.

“Solar thermal and solar electric are very reliable forms of producing power,” he said. “Solar panels are a proven technology. The first solar panels developed for the space program are still putting out 90 percent of what they were producing back in 1968, which is pretty phenomenal.

“And that’s old technology. Some people say the lifespan for the new panels is 35 years. There is a big initial investment, but you’ve got something that has a very low failure rate and is likely to produce power for possibly 50 years or more.

“The other part is solar thermal” — the rooftop systems that provide domestic hot water. “That technology has been around for 35 to 40 years. They are tried and true. These are performers with track records. You put them in, they function and produce the power and the hot water.”

In developing a workable approach to a communal solar micro-grid system, van Duijn and the project’s consultants devised a system that budgets 450 kilowatt hours of solar power each month to every household.

“With 11 homes, you are going to get very different usages in different homes,” van Duijn said. “This is a year-round community, but, inevitably, there’s going to be one home where the people are not here year-round. Those people may want 450 kilowatts of power every month for the two months they are here, which leaves 10 months they’re not here. One household may have an older couple who are using 150 kilowatt hours each month and another a family that uses 600 a month. Everything has to metered.”

Daryl DeJoy of Penobscot, who designed the solar array so that it can be easily expanded as new residents move in, said 450 kilowatt hours is more electricity than an energy-efficient home requires in a month.

“A really energy-efficient house uses 10 or 11 kilowatt hours a day, which is 300 to 325 a month,” he said. “Nielsen is giving them more, but asks them to work toward energy efficiency.”

That he is.

“We’re asking people to be more conservative with their energy,” van Duijn said. “We are tied to the grid, and the accumulation of them not being energy efficient leads to an electric bill. If we use more than we are producing, then it’s the law of the farm: we have to go out and buy our vegetables, because we’ve eaten more than we’ve produced.”

To encourage energy conservation, van Duijn has been working with RainWise, a Bar Harbor firm that produces electronic weather monitoring systems, in engineering a patent-pending, computer-linked “e-monitor” that generates real-time energy audits of every room in a house.

“I’ve become aware of how important it is that people change their habits,” van Duijn said. “And people can’t change their habits unless they are aware of what they are doing. The e-monitor is a way for people to understand, on a moment-to-moment basis, how what they are doing in their homes affects their bottom line, certainly their wallets. It allows them to understand how they are affecting the environment as well, in a very graphic, easy-to-read format.”

Van Duijn understands that information is power. The new e-monitor being marketed by a Blue Hill-based company called Power House Dynamics is linked to the circuit panel and collects information about electricity usage within each of the circuits, and even outlets, within a house. That data is transmitted through a Web server to a database, where it is processed and analyzed.

“That information in a presentation format gets sent back to the homeowner,” said van Duijn. “That gets displayed on any PDA (personal digital assistant) or laptop or any wireless device that has access to the Internet. It can also be accessed anywhere in the world with a cell phone. It’s an educational tool that spells out to consumers the cost in dollars of their energy use.”

When Canadian utility companies installed meters that showed homeowners their electricity costs in dollars instead of kilowatt hours they were using on a daily basis, the savings in those homes were between 15 and 20 percent.

“After a period of time,” van Duijn said, “the homeowners become aware of their energy usage.”