BANGOR, Maine — Maine’s largest wind energy developer hopes to submit a proposal to build a new, dramatically reduced industrial wind site on Bowers Mountain later this year in response to its first and biggest defeat in Maine.
The Land Use Regulation Commission voted 5-0 with little fanfare Friday to take a staff recommendation and reject the 27-turbine project during a brief meeting at the Four Points by Sheraton hotel on Godfrey Boulevard. Commissioner Robert Dunphy abstained.
Anti-wind power advocates and residential groups that had opposed the project called the LURC vote their most significant win since they started fighting projects proposed by First Wind of Massachusetts about five years ago.
“It’s a good day. We have been fighting this for a long time,” said David Corrigan, a registered Maine Master Guide from Concord Township who opposed the project. “This sets a great precedent. The commission spent a lot of time discussing and looking at this. I think it sets a precedent as far as how these projects should be scrutinized and what the results should be.”
For First Wind, the bad news in Bangor was offset by the company’s announcement that it had closed on Friday a $70 million nonrecourse construction loan and $6 million in letters of credit to build its 34-megawatt, 19-turbine project in Hancock County’s Bull and Heifer hills area near Eastbrook.
The financing, from Union Bank and an affiliate, will allow the company to move forward more aggressively with construction of the project. Crews are already doing preliminary work at the site and Matt Kearns, vice president for development at First Wind, said he anticipates work at Bull Hill will be complete by late fall. The project is expected to create about 200 jobs during construction and, once operational, the facility will generate roughly $340,000 in tax payments and community benefits payments to surrounding localities.
LURC approved the Bull Hill project in October 2011 during the same meeting at which commissioners ordered staff to prepare the decision rejecting First Wind subsidiary Champlain Wind’s application to build on Bowers Mountain. LURC’s 4-0 vote on April 6 opposing Champlain’s request for more time to revise its project effectively doomed the $130 million proposal.
Champlain wanted to build the wind farm in a rural, sparsely populated area east of Springfield on the Penobscot-Washington county line, but neighbors and guides who work the area successfully argued that the site would mar the pristine beauty of the nine-lake region, considered by some to be one of Maine’s most beautifully natural and unspoiled regions.
Commissioners said they were swayed by arguments that the project would have a punishing effect on hundreds of nature guides and other tourism-based industries employing hundreds more indirectly that all depend on the area’s beauty to survive.
The project would have been built within three miles of Pleasant, Shaw, Duck and Junior lakes and eight miles from Scraggly, Keg, Bottle, Sysladobsis and Pug lakes.
The commission’s scenic consultant said that Champlain’s consultants downplayed the project’s impact upon the region. In their 27-page decision commissioners said they relied heavily on testimony from the area’s guides that the turbines “would reduce the likelihood their clients would want to return to the area and thus [the turbines would] adversely impact their businesses.”
The area’s small businesses include sporting camps, lodges and housekeeping cabins, hunting fishing guides, and retail and service
businesses that cater to tourists.
Neil Kiely, director of First Wind’s New England development, said the commission’s decision was unfortunate but ultimately not fatal to the company’s Bowers Mountain plans. As far as First Wind is concerned, the project met all LURC criteria except one — that which regards visual impacts, he said.
“It’s not unusual for us to encounter feedback from project neighbors and go on from there and build,” Kiely said. “This is sort of the normal course of business for us. I expect that we will be submitting a small project and looking at the number of turbines.”
For Kevin Gurall, president of the group Partnership for the Preservation of the Downeast Lakes Watershed, LURC’s decision was the culmination of three years of fighting to preserve Bowers Mountain.
“We did not have a lot of money behind us,” Gurall said, noting that group members didn’t have enough money to afford an attorney and did much of its own legal preparation. “Initially, as a landowner, I was concerned that the project would depreciate our land values, but it grew to be more than that.”
Opponents projected a 20 to 40 percent decrease in land values with the project’s construction, he said.
Gurall complimented commissioners for seeing how the project would have devastated the area’s guide businesses.
“We were blessed with a fantastic area to defend and blessed with a lot of good people to help us,” Gurall said. “LURC did an extremely good job.”
Gurall said his group hopes to work with legislators to tighten regulation of wind farm projects and to build more protection for sporting camps and guide businesses into state law.
Boo Hoo, but then again I don’t like LURC either…
Will off-shore wind take the slack? If consumers are willing to pay double the price of commercial power, a debate might be held on the comparative impacts and benefits of off-shore versus on-land wind. With the price of natural gas being so low and available via a pipeline from Canada, giant wind and other renewable energy sources without predictability and realibility might go the way of prehistoric dinosaurs. Strange how horizontal drilling and hydro-fracking are “acceptable” because they are inexpensive and relatively benign environmentally. The trick is to find a source which is invisible (i.e., below ground excavation), cheap, and regulatory free to meet our never ending demands.
I am pleased with this ruling… but as another said, I don’t like LURC much either.
Wind power generation is not profitable without subsidies. Sure, it is “feel good” power. The problem is primarily with placement. Taking every pristine mountain top in Maine is just not the way to go. It is industrial use and it belongs in an industrial area. Why do they go to rural areas? Cheap land, a limited number of residents that can be “purchased” for little money and little in the way of oversight. The Bowers project began with First Winds” lawyer going door to door clad in flannel shirt professing to be just a regular guy looking to help the community. The conversation begins with ‘WHAT CAN WE DO TO MAKE YOU A SUPPORTER”. The practice is nothing short of shamless. Thank you LURC for doing the right thing. If it were left to the locals First Wind would have purchased a favorable outcome.
I hadn’t hear that they went door to door in red flannel. They should have worn red blinking lights to be honest.
Did they really go door to door dressed up, that’s pretty ridiculous.
There will be others. Rumor has it that this was an undesired project anyway and FW was using it as a straw man to divert attention and make the hairy-pitters feel victorious…
Like heck.
“…
in response to its first and biggest defeat in Maine”.
Wouldn’t it also be its smallest defeat. And it’s most medium-sized defeat?
It is now time for the legislature to drastically revise Baldacci’s “Emergency” wind law that put Maine and Mainers in the crosshairs of this most shameless and fraudulent parasitizing industry.
LURC courageously defends Maine! NRCM should be hanging their hard hat wearing heads in shame.
Oh Jeesh. No need for melodrama. Nice area. No need for more windmills.
Finally some really good news. Hopefully soon we can start decommissioning those Industrial turbines that have been forced upon us and wrestle with retuning Maine to it’s natural state.
Congratulations LURC for standing against the tide and putting
the true interests of Maine, the state, over the interests of the
politically well connected wind lobby.
This is one wind project that will not be causing an increase
of electric rates and wasting more millions of our tax dollars in the form
of federal subsidies.
The last thing we need is to have LURC replaced by the untethered corruption of the PUC.
It’s nice to see the LURC commissioners make a decision based on existing statute – as bad as Maine wind siting statute is – and the best interests of Maine as a whole, and not in service to a few discrete special interests.
Wind development is not critical for Maine. It’s no more important than other renewables like biomass, hydropower, solar or tidal energy, and we don’t give those sectors the statutory red carpet treatment that we do to wind developers. There simply is no good reason to be liquidating Maine’s best assets and degrading citizens’ quality of life to accommodate it at every turn just because a powerful wind lobby wants us to.
Didn’t you all want to abolish LURC not too long ago? Maybe for a different cause.
Thank you, Kevin Gurall, LURC Commissioners and all who have fought to protect Maine’s wilderness, beauty and wildlife from exploitation and degradation by First Wind carpetbaggers.
BDN buried this story in record time!
What has FirstWind learned from this? They didn’t do their homework in the first place or they would not have proposed the Bowers site. They didn’t do their homework in Mars Hill either or they wouldn’t have had to settle 17 lawsuits . A 5th grader would have googled wind in Europe and noticed the problems siting wind litter too close to homes. It appears this company has no concern about Maine people, places, businesses or recreational opportunities, except for those that serve their purposes. We were here first, and we must defend our state or the developers will turn Maine into Massachusetts. Maine 1A an 1B lakes are not Massachusetts mud puddles. Our lakes are worth protecting. If the turbine huggers have learned to appreciate Maine’s lakes, they would withdraw the Oakfield project after paying off the people they have bribed. Neil Kiely could go back to Mass. for his next project an leave ME alone.
The Maine Department of Environmental Destruction should have had the intelligence and integrity to have also denied the Oakfield / Island Falls wind permit. This permit allows for fifty 500 foot tall wind turbines to overlook 2 of Maine’s most pristine wilderness lakes (Lake Pleasant and Lake Mattawamkeag) and violates the same scenic impact values that the LURC wisely denied at Bowers. This is the same area where President Theodore Roosevelt spent his youth and became America’s greatest environmental president. Hopefully the Maine Supreme Court will correct this injustice!
Thank you, LURC, and all who worked so hard to protect this very special place. First Wind really believes their industrial turbines are more important than protecting Maine’s biggest ecnomic asset, her natural landscapes. At a meeting of the Maine Tourism Board, a First Wind rep pitching the benefits of industrial wind circulated a picture of a Kansas plain covered with wind turbines and proudly announced that Maine could look like this, too. I don’t really think they get the fact that Maine is a special place, but they sure do understand federal subsidy $$$$ and RECs. Shame on them for threatening to come back with another proposal for this area. They’re showing their true colors by making that statement. It’s all about greed, not green. Those big white towers they’re so proud of will be broken down, covered with rust and leaking hydraulic fluid in a few short years. Maine doesn’t need to become another Chinese junkyard like California, Texas and Hawaii where thousands of abandoned wind turbines litter the landscape. Keep Maine beautiful! Tourism is our strongest, biggest and best economic engine.
Thank you to LURC and to the commissioners you have restored my faith in the system.
Why is the lead off sentence in the article the hype that First Whiner wants their potential investors to hear and not the fact that these parasites were crushed?
Because Nick Sambides Jr. and Kevin Miller are the authors. You will find they’ve never written anything but supportive articles for these projects – perhaps because they’ve never bothered to do any actual investigation into the viability of mountaintop wind farms.
If only the hicks in Eastbrook could summon up enough common sense and smarts to wipe the dollars signs out of their heads and reject the initiative there.