East Liverpool city council members met Tuesday afternoon to talk about a potential solar power energy project that would provide electricity for city buildings.

East Liverpool may not seem like an ideal place for solar panels to gather enough sun energy to make them worth it but an Arizona company, partially founded by a former East Liverpool grad, says "it is."

"If you compare the system that we build in Arizona where we are from, the only difference between there and here is it is 30% bigger. That's to make up for the 30% less sun hours we get in Ohio on an annual basis when compared to them," said Matt Brophey of Scout Solar.

Scout Solar is the company and they want to build out a solar energy system for East Liverpool.
It would be funded by private investors and government incentives.

"It's metered. It collects electric and it goes back into the grid so it's not something we are going to have to pay for. There's no cost regardless of how much energy we collect and how much is not collected," said councilman Brian Kerr.

Scout Solar would also pay for maintaining the system over a 25 year-long agreement.
Anything they build would then stay in the community.

"The structures we've seen in all the investigations we've done are beautiful. They can do wonderful structures for the city and provide shade, they can do amphitheaters," said councilman Tom Beagle.

East Liverpool council could vote on legislation to make a contract with Scout Energy as early as Monday.