SWAMPSCOTT – Town Administrator Andrew Maylor confirmed that a project to retrofit the high school and middle school with solar panels was back on track, two months after the project’s original financier withdrew and put the project in jeopardy.”We fully executed the agreement, the new financier is Constellation Energy,” Maylor said Friday. “Now the logistical process begins.”The project is a public-private partnership among the Town of Swampscott and Swampscott Public Schools, contractor and industrial technology company Johnson Controls Inc., and, now, Constellation Energy. The project includes retrofitting the high school roof with 1,666 photovoltaic panels (solar panels that convert light energy to power) and the middle school roof with 294 panels in order to reduce school energy costs.According to Maylor, Johnson will construct, “own” and maintain the panels. In return, the town will let Johnson use the roofs and buy the power produced from the panels at a specific, below-market rate for 20 years, Maylor said. REGeneration Finance, of Harrison, N.Y. would have financed the project by selling the resulting renewable energy credits.But the financier’s negotiations over the value of those credits halted construction in mid-July. In early August the company had backed out of the agreement, citing a court case that eliminated the minimum price of renewable energy credits and made the project unprofitable for them, the Daily Item previously reported.Maylor said that the only substantial change to the project is that the town was able to negotiate a slightly lower rate for the power, but did not provide a specific number on Friday.He said that the schools and town would meet within the next week to determine a construction schedule that would not interfere with school activities.”It’s exciting, it will be one of the larger renewable energy installations on a public building in the state,” he said. “It’s been a taking awhile, though,” he acknowledged.
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