Smart wind power, or not-so-smart?

Robert Kimber

Copyright © 2006 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.

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Yes, global warming is real. Yes, we ought to do something about it. Fast, too. Time's a-wasting. Inuit villages in Alaska are washing into the sea; Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania is shedding its famous snows. And, yes, wind power can generate electricity without generating greenhouse gases. Ergo: The greater planetary good requires us to put turbines in some of Maine's highest mountain terrain as quickly as possible.

No, hold on a minute. Let's not be panicky first-aiders who apply a tourniquet to stop potentially fatal bleeding from a serious wound. The patient survives but loses a leg that a less draconian treatment could have saved.

In early August, the Land Use Regulation Commission (LURC) will hold hearings on Endless Energy's application to rezone Redington Mountain and Black Nubble for construction of 30 wind turbines on these peaks. Keep in mind, too, that TransCanada, a Canadian energy company, is proposing a wind power project in the Boundary Mountains that would require not only turbines on Kibby Mountain and the Kibby Range but also a transmission line beginning near the Canadian border and running roughly 25 miles south to deliver the power into the grid at Stratton. Both these projects are located in what the Northern Forest Alliance has designated as the Western Mountains Wildlands, a region whose ecological, scenic, and recreational values make it worthy of special protection, a region whose preservation is a matter of statewide, if not national, concern.

But, you may object, even resources of state and national importance shrink to insignificance in the face of the global emergency. We need turbines on Redington and Kibby now so that Manhattan and Miami won't be underwater in the year 2080. Given the possible catastrophe we face, your mountains are molehills. Write them off and shut up.

The alternatives are not anywhere near so stark. We can have wind power in Maine without it costing us either an arm or a leg. The Midwest provides the model. Conflicts with wildland conservation are not an issue for wind power projects on agricultural land in Minnesota and the Dakotas. Also, because road access is largely in place on farmland and because any additional road building necessary is on stable soils and on relatively flat terrain, erosion is not problem, construction costs are reduced, and maintenance is simplified.

The wind resource on the Great Plains falls largely in wind power classes 3 and 4, "fair to good" on a 1 to 7 scale, not as good as the Class 6 and 7 winds found on Maine mountaintops but good enough to justify plenty of wind power projects. So if I were a wind power developer in Maine, I'd look for sites where the wind resource might not top the scale but would still be commercially viable, where I would not have to apply to the Land Use Regulation Commission for rezoning, and where I would not have to bang heads with people who think wind power on appropriate sites is smart indeed but not so smart where it requires sacrificing mountain and forest regions conservationists have been working for decades to protect.

That is exactly what some wind power developers have done and are doing. The Mars Hill project is in a developed area and on a hill with communication towers already on it. Linekin Bay Energy is considering a much larger project on agricultural land in northern Aroostook County. This project, with 500 megawatt (MW) generating capacity, could provide more than twice the capacity of both the Redington and Trans-Canada projects combined (90 and 130 MW, respectively). Projects in western New York state are going ahead in areas with wind power classes of only 2 and 3.

Many wind power industry people understand the need to avoid conflict with other resources, and the industry is developing turbines suitable for lower wind power classes and for widely distributed, smaller-scale projects.

The point is simple: Wind power projects can and should be located in already developed areas. Perhaps the slogan could be, "Yes, in our backyards but not in our wild lands." Granted, Maine will not have as many unproblematic sites for large-scale wind power plants as the Midwest offers, but a few in Aroostook County and a network of smaller projects throughout the state provide a way for Maine to make a significant contribution to wind power development while preserving our invaluable mountain terrain.

Robert Kimber is a writer who lives in Temple, Maine; he can be contacted at rrkimber@megalink.net. This is the first of his bi-monthly columns for this newspaper.