The town will save about $3,000 a year on recreation center electricity bills once solar panels the town earned from the state's Clean Energy Fund are installed and running by next month.

Largely due to outreach efforts from Ridgefield Action Committee for the Environment, 516 of the town's households have signed up since 2007 to participate in CTCleanEnergyOptions, which requires at least 100 participants for a town to earn solar panels on a town building.

The program adds a small surcharge to participants' monthly bills which goes toward supporting clean energy. The more households that sign up the more solar panels a town is qualified to receive.

Ridgefield's incoming panels, which will yield 15.2 kilowatts, are going on the recreation center because it's the town building that uses the most electricity—about $8,000 worth each month. Installers were on the center's roof last week to mark where to install the railings that will anchor the panels, which are slated to be added next week, RACE member Dwayne Escola said.

The contractor has told Escola that the installation should be complete by the end of December, which means the panels will be functioning in early January.

"They were going to scatter them on a couple buildings," Escola said of the rec center-bound panels. "For example, the fire house has a beautiful south-facing roof on Catoonah Street. But they found that it was going to be really difficult because of the materials the roof was made of. So they decided to put all of them on the rec center."

The second-biggest municipal energy user is the old high school. The current high school uses the most energy of any building in town, Escola said, but it's not a municipal building.

RACE helped sign residents up for the program by setting up booths at town events, reaching out to media outlets as well as challenging, and then beating, five nearby towns in a race to sign up the most new households in Summer 2008.