How a Small Vermont Town Bet on Solar — and Won
When the grid kept failing, the residents of Putney built their own. Now their cooperative model is being copied across New England.
On a Tuesday morning in late March, the power went out in Putney, Vermont, for the fourth time in six weeks. By the time the regional utility had restored service that afternoon, an eighty-one-year-old retired schoolteacher named Cora Linfield had already filled out the paperwork to join what she would later describe, with a slight smile, as "the local insurrection."
The insurrection in question is the Putney Energy Cooperative, an unusual hybrid of municipal utility, neighborhood association, and crowdfunded power plant. Five years after its first meeting in the back room of the General Store, the cooperative now generates more than half of the town’s residential electricity from a network of small solar arrays scattered across donated farmland, rooftops, and a former gravel pit. On the day Linfield signed up, the cooperative’s lights had stayed on through the regional outage — a fact she found, in her words, "embarrassingly satisfying."
A model built from frustration
The cooperative was the idea of a former software engineer named Devin Bouchard, who had moved to Putney during the pandemic and grown tired of explaining to his neighbors why the streetlights kept going out. Bouchard’s pitch was deceptively simple: instead of waiting for the utility to upgrade its aging substations, residents would pool capital and build the upgrades themselves. The cooperative would own the panels, sell the power back to the grid at wholesale, and credit the savings against members’ bills.
The model is sometimes described, somewhat misleadingly, as community solar. In practice it is closer to what economists call a consumer cooperative — a structure that lets a group of households jointly own a productive asset that none of them could afford individually. The legal scaffolding is borrowed from rural electric cooperatives of the 1930s, which electrified the American countryside when no private utility would. What is new is the technology and, perhaps more importantly, the patience of the spreadsheet.
For most of the first year, the patience of the spreadsheet was the cooperative’s only real asset. Bouchard and a handful of volunteers modeled scenarios in the kind of obsessive detail that drives accountants to either great loyalty or early retirement. They argued about discount rates, panel-degradation curves, and whether to budget for a one-in-fifty-year ice storm. The model that finally passed required each founding household to commit ¤4,200 over twenty-four months, with an expected payback period of nine years and a long-tail benefit of roughly two decades.
“We were not trying to save the planet. We were trying to keep our refrigerators running. The planet thing was a bonus.”
By the second winter, the spreadsheet was beginning to look prophetic. The cooperative’s first array, a 240-kilowatt installation on the south slope of a dairy farm owned by a member who accepted shares in lieu of lease payments, produced fifteen percent more energy than its conservative projection. The second array, mounted on the roof of the elementary school, attracted a state grant that closed the financing gap on the third. By the third winter, the cooperative had reached what Bouchard calls escape velocity — the point at which generation revenue covers operating costs, debt service, and the small reserve fund that pays for repairs after storms.
Spillover, and skepticism
The most surprising effect of the cooperative, however, has not been on the grid. It has been on the conversation. Town meetings in Putney now routinely run twice their previous length because residents arrive with questions about megawatt-hours and capacity factors. A high school class on local government has rewritten its curriculum around the cooperative’s bylaws. Two neighboring towns — Townshend and Westminster — have begun formal feasibility studies modeled on Putney’s, and a third has commissioned a legal review of the cooperative’s membership agreement.
Not everyone is convinced. The regional utility has filed two complaints with the Vermont Public Utility Commission, arguing that the cooperative’s net-metering arrangement amounts to an unfair subsidy from non-member ratepayers. Energy economists are split on the merits of the complaint. The cooperative’s critics within Putney itself are mostly older residents who worry, with some justification, about what happens when a panel breaks in twenty years and the warranty has lapsed. Bouchard’s response is that the reserve fund is the answer, but he acknowledges that the model has not yet been tested by time.
What the model has been tested by, instead, is weather. In the four-and-a-half years since the cooperative began generating power, Putney has experienced two ice storms severe enough to make regional news, a tropical storm that flooded the river that runs through the center of town, and a derecho that took out the regional grid for nineteen hours. Each time, the cooperative’s arrays were either undamaged or back online within a day. Linfield, the retired schoolteacher, said this was the single argument that had finally convinced her husband, who had spent forty years skeptical of, as she put it, "anything that wasn’t in the Sears catalog."
The arithmetic of patience
Whether the Putney model can be replicated at scale is now the subject of more dissertations than the town’s population would seem to warrant. The cooperative’s appeal is partly aesthetic — a story about ordinary people who refused to wait — and partly mathematical. The arithmetic of small-scale solar in New England has changed quickly enough, between panel prices, state incentives, and grid-resilience anxieties, to make projects that were marginal in 2020 routinely viable in 2026. What the cooperative supplies, above and beyond the arithmetic, is a structure for getting capital and consent into the same room.
That structure may not generalize. Vermont is a state with strong cooperative traditions, a small population, and a regulatory regime unusually friendly to municipal utilities. Bouchard is the first to say that the model that worked in Putney would have to be adapted, and probably weakened, to work in a place like the suburbs of Boston or the exurbs of Atlanta. But the broader lesson — that ordinary people can, under the right conditions, build their own infrastructure — has begun to circulate well beyond the town’s borders.
When asked what she would tell another town considering the model, Linfield thought for a moment. "Read the spreadsheet," she said finally. "And then read it again." She paused. "And bring snacks to the meetings. The meetings go long."