On the Roof
Temporada 1
Everybody's Waiting on a Number
From Wind to Wire
por Yehuda Gittleson
There's a homeowner in Windham who waited four months to find out if his solar project cost thirty thousand dollars more than he thought. This episode is about that wait, and what it teaches about a year defined by numbers that don't show up on time. Yehuda traces a line from crane work on Aroostook County wind farms to interconnection queues at Central Maine Power, walks through what the loss of the federal tax credit actually did to a typical Maine solar payback period, and explains why the Public Utilities Commission just brought in an outside auditor to check how utilities calculate what homeowners get charged. Plus a new plug-in solar law, and why it won't solve the problem everyone thinks it will.
Most people assume Yehuda Gittelson grew up wanting to work in solar. He didn't. He grew up in Bangor, studied mechanical engineering at UMaine, and took a job doing wind farm site assessments in Aroostook County because it was the renewable energy work that existed. When that ended, he drove south to Portland, got hired as a junior installer, and learned the trade from the roof down. This episode traces the full arc, from a college lecture hall to a wind ridge near the Canadian border to a rooftop in South Portland, and what he figured out along the way about the gap between a good energy resource and a working energy system.
Yehuda Gittelson is a solar installer based in Portland, Maine. In this first episode, he explains what the show is and what it isn't, how he got from a mechanical engineering degree to wind farm development in Aroostook County to residential solar installation across southern Maine, and what the job actually looks like from the roof up. No panels, no pundits. Just the work.