Last summer, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick okayed a law making it legal for state utilities to own solar sites. So far, no utility has actually proposed the purchase of any such sites–until now. Western Massachusetts Electric Co. has announced it’s looking at several sites within its service area on which to potentially install solar electric systems. According to the Boston Herald, “The company has identified eight potential hosts for solar panels and plans to invest $42 million in a first phase that could start generating power as soon as next year.” If WMEC takes full advantage of the capacity of these sites, it would come close to doubling the state’s current solar capacity of 8mw–all at a cost of less than $1/month to each customer of the utility.