It's blue skies ahead for Coastal Enterprises' (CEI) next move to tap the sun for energy at Deer Ridge Apartments. A project to add more solar trackers met with no resistance, passing unanimously Monday night with the Wiscasset Planning Board.

The trackers use GPS to get the most sun, according to CEI’s head of lending John Egan and Richard Simon of The Power Company; the Washington-based company will own the trackers until an option opens up years from now for CEI to buy them. In the meantime, CEI will buy the power from the company, Egan said.

That doesn’t mean leaving Central Maine Power’s grid, Egan told the board. The energy the trackers yield will offset the electricity the 27 apartments off Route 218 use; in the winter when the trackers yield less energy, CEI can tap the credits it has built up at other times, Egan said.

CEI’s housing arm, not the apartments’ tenants, pay electricity costs, he said. “So we have a nice incentive to try and offset that (usage).”

In the meeting and a brief interview afterward, the two men said adding as many as six more trackers should bring the property to net zero or near net zero on the property’s energy needs. The existing three trackers already offset about a third of the demand, they said.

“They are performing just as we expected,” Egan said.

The solar power at Deer Ridge offsets more of the energy demand than at any other Maine sites where CEI has it, he said. Those are in Damariscotta, Waldoboro, Lewiston, Auburn and Houlton.

The board declared the application complete and then approved it. The project needs no further board review or public hearing because it's under 2,500 square feet, Chairman Ray Soule said.

Soule asked Egan and Simon if the new trackers are the same size as the others.

“They are,” Egan said. “Just more of them.”

Plans call for the new trackers to be installed this summer, Egan said later.

The Ordinance Review Committee was also set to meet Monday night. However, 16 minutes after the scheduled start, Chairman Karl Olson declared there was no quorum. Four members were needed, Town Planner Ben Averill said. Three were there.