GRAND LAKE STREAM, Maine — Gov. Paul LePage was mostly casual and off-the-record as he chatted with the finance industry elite gathered at Leen’s Lodge on Friday. But he did make brief remarks about First Wind’s efforts to build 27 wind turbines in Carroll Plantation and Kossuth Township.
A cohort of local guides and lodge owners gathered to present the governor with a commemorative oar to celebrate LePage’s support in their fight to prevent the wind-power company from building the windmills in view of Grand Lake Stream.
The turbines “would have a negative impact on the outdoor tourism, which is the lifeblood of this region,” said Kevin Gurrell, director of the Partnership for the Preservation of the Downeast Lakes Watershed, a local group organized to fight First Wind.
“To say they would overshadow this whole lake system is an understatement,” he said.
LePage told the outdoorsmen and business owners that while wind may be one piece of the renewable energy puzzle, “they’re not one of my favorite projects.”
He said wind could not support the baseload energy needs of the state, and called it a “boutique energy source.”
“Wind is also expensive, and I’m trying to decrease energy costs for Maine,” he said. “Let’s work with what we’ve got available and make it work,” he added, referring to Maine’s supply of natural gas.
Still, the governor said he supported efforts to invest in renewable energy, though only ones he thought were both economically feasible and effective.
“There are renewables that work,” he said. “Like hydro, hydro and more hydro.”
“Like hydro, hydro and more hydro.”
Exactly.
Vermont secured a 20+ year deal for only about 6 cents per kwh from Hydro-Quebec. Governor LePage is trying to do the same but he has been thwarted by NRCM and the wind industry. Basically, The Governor wanted to classify 100MW hydro (big dams) as renewable, but NRCM and the wind industry and their slick Portland lawyers convinced the legislature that running water is not a renewable. That is what is thus far keeping us from helping ourselves to low, low, low longterm prices from Canada.
“Running water is not a renewable” the Portland lawyers said and the legislature bought it.
You can’t make this stuff up.
And like hydro lets not forget bio-mass from wood chips.Reclaim some of theses paper mills no longer in use with a steam generator and produce electricity.Puts more loggers to work creates full time local jobs and construction jobs and forget about the feel good solution like wind.
Not only does your idea have merit, but take it one step further. In the last 40 years, Maine has had 400,000 acres of farmland abandoned, now growing up into trash trees. Many of these farmlands are in close proximity to these potential biomass generators. Hybrid poplar grows 60 feet in 8-10 years. We could put people to work on biomass fuel plantations.
Here is a contrast worth thinking about. In Lincoln Lakes, First Wind built the $177 million Rollins Wind project. At 60 MW, this project turned out only 22.34% of capacity in the 2nd quarter of 2012, or 13 MW of unpredictable, unreliable power. It employs 4 or 5 maintenance people, but First Wind won’t say. There is no multiplier effect to the region’s employment. The project sprawls across 7 miles of blasted, leveled, and scalped ridges and its 40 turbines now dominate the views.
8 miles down the road in West Enfield is the Covanta biomass plant that sits there 24/7 cranking out a steady predictable 25 MW. The plant cost $70 million to build and employs 25 people and it has a multiplier effect due to the size of its payroll and because it helps support jobs in the woods industry. The plant sits on less than 50 acres and nobody knows it is there hidden off US Rte 2.
Quite a contrast! I don’t buy into the idea that Maine should be a huge source of electricity for Southern New England. Let them build power plants where they are needed. But if we are to produce more power, let’s do biomass, not wind!
Not accurate; the Northern Forest Alliance has concluded our biomass is growing at a rate of 2-3% above current usage. Urban biomass is growing even faster; accounting for ever larger amounts being delivered to landfills.
Couldn’t agree more on large bio mass plants; but pellet mills are a different and far more profitable alternative. Actually site evaluated the biomass plant at deBlois, opp. the Wyman plantation, mass relic of a boom that ate up all the good wood in the surrounding area. The Peat bogs surrounding—and arenewable!, it are mined for agricultural purposes since there is more money in ag. peat than in drying it to burn in the biomass boilers. There were three units for several MW of power, now rusting away, waiting for a savior!
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Wind power is great, but it seems the only place in Maine with sustained winds that can be harnessed all the time is off shore. And hydro was proven to always work in the past just fine.
You are completely wrong. Wind power is not great. It is so economically unfeasible that it gets built only due to tax subsidies and credits, selling Enron-inspired RECs, and heinous arbitrary mandates to force utilities to accept into the grid the most expensive and least efficient source of electricity. The capacity factors for the most recent report on the FERC website, 2nd quarter 2012, show Record Hill: 22.57%; Rollins: 22.34%; Kibby: 20.25%; Stetson 2: 17.84%; Stetson 1: 15.64%; Mars Hill: 29.75%. Very poor record, but as predicted based on NREL projections.
Regarding off shore: Yes, the wind may be a better resource in the Gulf of Maine than on-shore. Again, NREL predicts that. However, consider the extra costs of ocean based wind power. At Block Island, RI the shallow water wind project will use existing components, with monopoles secured directly to the ocean floor. The contract for the project is for 24 cents per kwh, with a 3.5% annual index. By contrast, the wholesale price to ISO-NE is around 6 cents per kwh. So Block Island is 4 times the cost.
In the Gulf of Maine, the technology for floating rafts of turbines in deep water hasn’t even been developed. It is bound to be far more expensive than block Island. It wouldn’t surprise me if it were twice the cost of Block Island, as it must be designed to survive “The Perfect Storm” (search NOAA and the website states 60 mph sustained winds for 2 days and 40 foot seas), otherwise, it will all end up as salvage in Nova Scotia somewhere.
Capacity factor for hydro is estimated at 44%.
http://www.jcmiras.net/surge/p130.htm Don't go screaming about the inefficiency of wind if you’re trying to sell hydro.
People freak out over the wind project’s “devastation” of mountaintops and their ruination of vast tracts of forest. A typical wind project will have maybe three or four acres of cleared area per turbine. A typical hydropower impoundment will inundate thousands of acres – take a look at Flagstaff Lake and tell me how devastating those wind projects are. You want to continue burning coal? You will need to keep building new plants to keep up with population growth, and we need to reduce combustion byproducts in the atmosphere, not increase them. You want nuke plants? I hope you’re OK with all the nuke waste piling up in your front yard for then next 20,000 years. You want more hydro? great idea, let’s dam up every stream in the state and to hell with the fishing industry.
We need diversification in our energy supply. Wind is part of it. If you want to whine about subsidization, how about the beef industry, or the oil industry, or any of the dozens of other hugely profitable industries the get huge breaks because they own big time politicians.
I am actually very good at whining about subsidization, as my position is get the US Government and the states to hell out of subsidizing , providing tax credits, or mandates for every form of energy. When we can do this, we will make a good dent in our national budget deficit and we will also unleash free markets which will find cost effective price levels and lead to far more innovation than the government picking winners and losers. What will happen is energy-dense, reliable sources of power will prevail. Non-competetive scams like ethanol, wind and large scale solar will go away.
BTW, hydro capacity factors are largely affected by the site and the water resource, with base load providers having cf in the 70s percentages. Here in Maine, we have already developed the few good hydro sites. Back in the 70’s, the Big A and Dickey-Lincoln dam proposals were dropped because in the final analysis, they were not cost effective. There is no place in my comment that I proposed developing more hydro.
Finally, regarding the devastation to the ridges by wind power development, you are mouthing that wind industry line. Have you ever witnessed the blasting that takes place for these projects? The wind industry always trots out the figure for each turbine, completely ignoring the clearcuts that encompass the road building, the on-site gravel and rock quarries, and the powerline cuts. I damn well know what an acre is because I grew up on a farm. When I calculated the sprawl of the Rollins project in Lincoln Lakes, I took it all into account, from the southern-most turbine in Burlinton to the substation in Mattawamkeag more than 20 miles away and that single project clear-cut at least 1,000 acres of carbon sequestering trees.
Yes, I have seen wind projects that involved lots of blasting, with major cuts and fills. I’ve also seen wind projects with minimal blasting, and I’ve seen a condo project with way more blasting than several of the wind projects that I have seen, combined. Not every wind project has 30-foot fills and 20-foot cuts. I’ve been involved in surveying and construction for nearly 40 years, and I also know what an acre is. Have you ever been up in the UT and toured around on the logging roads – I mean WAY out in the woods, hours from pavement – and looked at the size and number of harvests that are continually ongoing up there? The cutting for a wind project is a drop in the bucket. And they are much more closely monitored than timber operations, so there is far less likelihood of environmental damage to streams and wetlands.
Harnessing tidal power is developing. Another good thing.
Brazen Baldacci put Botox on this Boutique when he smoothed out all the wrinkles facing wind by engineering Maine’s expedited wind law for the wind industry at the expense of Maine’s citizens.
Guess what, because of wind every CMP customer in the state now pays transmission charges that are 19.6% higher (effective 7/1/12). To learn more about this travesty google: “What every Maine ratepayer needs to know”.
That 19.6% increase is the work of Baldacci, his PUC chair Kurt Adams who went on to a wind company after taking $1 million in stock options from them while at the PUC and Angus the insider King. And there are many more electricity costs increases to come.
These bums are suffocating our economy.
We have to strike while we have sympathetic politicians in the State House and Blair House. Everyone has to write your State Senators and Congressmen to get them to put a stop to the Industrial Wind projects that are being shoved down our throats and destroying our mountaintops. Maine already makes more electricity than we need, and more renewable energy is available to the north at a very cheap price. And we don’t have to make outrageously expensive upgrades to our grid. We should stop bending to the green industries that are actually making OUR state LESS green than it was. We should keep and upgrade our dams along our major rivers that have been there for more than 100 years as they produce far more dependable and constant power than solar and wind, and are compatible with the current grid. It’s time to use common sense and do what we do best . . . . keep Maine pristine and beautiful for future generations.
Green industry? Yes for Angus King’s pockets. No, given all the taxpayer and ratepayer red ink.
Anyone gullible and uninformed enough to support wind turbines needs to read Robert Bryce’s “Renewable Energy’s Incurable Scale Problem” in http://www.energytribune.com. End of discussion.
For all you alternative energy enthusiasts, building more wind turbines will not shut down one single carbon based power plant. That is a fact! Instead, wind generators make those plants work more inefficiently and costly because they have to power up and down as the wind blows. Wind power is $0.24 p/kwh and hydro is $0.06 p/kwh. Gas right now is less than $0.10 p/kwh. We were sold a bill of goods by Angus King and his ilk during the Baldacci years and bought it lock stock and barrel. The only ones being helped by this fiasco are the politicians that have moved over to the “Private Sector” taking our money and scenic wilderness mountains with them. STOP THIS NOW and remember who is going to make the change in November. It’s time to turn Maine RED, and keep it GREEN.
I do not disagree with most of your relative comparative analysis or conclusions but your numbers are overstated by a factor of 10. Illustration: natural gas at $2.00 MCF contains 1 million BTUs required to generate 1 MW of power, i.e. 2 cents per kwhr. The average ISO-NE auction rate for the first half of 2012 has hovered around $25 mwhr, i.e. 2.5 cents per kwhr. NG power generators will not produce power if it cost more to generate than they receive in revenue.
In addition, wind generators have no significant variable operating cost but do have high fixed cost. Operating cost average around 1.5 to 2.5 cents per kwhr based on their capacity factors. However, their fixed capital cost per kwhr are huge compared to other generating sources. If ITC or PTC is available capital cost can be as low as 3.5 to 5.5 cents per kwhr. But without ITC or PTC the average cost per kwhr jumps to 8.0 to 12.0 cents.
Sorry Truthinmaine that you and all your figures think I am wrong because I said wind is great, it was meant to be sarcastic. I was just saying if they want wind, it would work better off shore where there are more constant winds if it could be developed to be workable. Mars Hill is a good example where it does not work as it was expected to and it ruined the landscape beside Route 1. I dont want those ugly things to look at or hear either.
I am sorry, I didn’t process your comment as sarcasm. I react with the economics arguments every time I see someone being supportive of the wind boondoggle, as I get weary of people embracing something that is going to be so costly and is being mandated. It is easy for people opposed to turbines on destroyed ridgetops to say lets put it out in the ocean. I hope sharing some information on the costs cause you and others to think through the economics.
You are right about Mars Hill. It is the same everywhere like Lincoln Lakes and Roxbury, once scenic places now dominated by ugly trubines. The Bull Hill project that First Wind is constructing will be clearly seen from Acadia National Park. Are we insane to spoil what makes Maine’s “Quality of Place” so special?
Thank you for speaking out against this travesty.
The wind industry is built on crony capitalism, and would not exist
otherwise.
Wind cannot provide base power for the grid and can never replace
conventional power plants.
Recent studies show that wind claims of reduced CO2 are grossly over stated
because other generators must be kept on standby status.
Taxpayer money builds them and power companies are required to buy wind
generated power at much higher rates to support them.
For Maine there is no true benefit from wind except to wind power
companies, politicians, Portland lawyers and lobbyists.
What a waste of tax payers money they could of had that event at one of the state building in Augusta .
Augusta in August? Surely, you jest.
Wollydevil, the event was not funded by the government. It was privately-funded. The governor was invited as a special guest.
Le Page is spot on with his comment. The wind turbines are a boondoggle passed on by liberals trying to act like they are concerned about the environment but in reality are making a ton of dough for themselves and thir friends. At least the republicans tell you in your face your getting screwed.
Industrial wind turbines have become a religious symbol to many environmentalists of what we should be doing to save the planet. Perhaps the most bizarre statement came from a selectman defending the absolute failure of an industrial turbine in his town in southern Maine; “It may not work but that doesn’t matter, it’s a symbol of what we should be doing.” Really? If we’re truly concerned about climate change, what we should be doing is getting it right. Industrial wind is a mature technology that will never provide dispatchable power to the grid. The only thing it has the power to do is raise electricity rates, cause brown outs when the erratic pulses of electricity these machines generate overwhelm the grid, destroy and fragment fragile mountain habitat with their incredible sprawl, kill federally protected raptors and migratory birds and threaten Maine’s priceless viewsheds. Canadian hydro and natural gas are big players in the energy portfolio but in order to sate the energy hungry appetites of a population at seven billion and growing, we need to incorporate small thorium reactors. Science based energy solutions should trump the politically motivated “greenwashing” of the American people. Maine’s biggest and most reliable economic engine is tourism and it will remain so only as long as we keep Maine beautiful.
And also keep Maine BTU-full, which won’t be accomplished with useless wind power.
Anyone who votes for Angus King is voting for industrial wind farms.
King preaches to the unwashed commoners about watching their carbon footprints. Then he gets in his Mercedez RV gas hog and drives off to one of his oversized multiple homes.
Silver tongue, brass balls.
Our next President, Mitt Romney, has just announced that he is going to eliminate the tax credits and subsidies for wind power. Now THAT is worth mentioning . . . . and along with what Gov LePage has said, we can only hope that Angus King and his windy cronies fade into the darkness. I think our new slogan should be “Make Maine Red and Keep It Green”.
Our next President, Mitt Romney, has just announced that he is going to eliminate the tax credits and subsidies for wind power. Now THAT is worth mentioning . . . . and along with what Gov LePage has said, we can only hope that Angus King and his windy cronies fade into the darkness. I think our new slogan should be “Make Maine Red and Keep It Green”.
Wind is a deceitful scam that has so many reasons it should be stopped, most of them listed in these comments. Forest fires, murder of bats and eagles among other endangered species, making people sign gag agreements so they cannot take action when the turbines make them sick and sleepless, deforestation, destruction, lies, greed and waste of taxpayer dollars for starts.
Mr. LePage is saving the fleet, keep up the great work.