Long gone are the days when islanders needed only a little whale oil in their lamps of an evening and a big pile of wood for the stove. Most modern Maine island residents and businesses are as dependent on reliable electricity as their mainland counterparts.
Islanders must run the water pumps to their wells, keep their oil furnaces going and power their lights, stereos, refrigerators, computers and small appliances. Some individual households on all the islands, especially summer folk, still choose to use personal generators.
But year-round island communities find a large number of household generators creates more noise and smell than residents care to tolerate, and something is always breaking down somewhere. Consequently the answer for residential islands is to provide central power, which is all conventional, generated by fossil-fuels, so far.
Islands have endless wind and tides, however, and some are inclined to try harvesting one or the other to lessen the cost of pricey offshore power.
Most islands receive power via undersea cables from the mainland – either buying power from the lowest bidder or using a mainland power company. Either way, cables mean the island is just as vulnerable to failures of the power grid as mainlanders. Additionally, unburied cables are at the mercy of environmental incidents and fishing equipment.
Generate your own
Two Maine islands, Monhegan and Matinicus, make their own electricity in on-island power generating plants. This alternative, while necessary for them, is extremely expensive.
“It’s worth it to live here,” laughs Katy Boegel, director of the Monhegan Plantation Power District, the four-year-old municipal power company for the island 10 miles off the coast. At 50 cents per kilowatt hour (KWH), the approximately 70 year-round households pay the highest rate on any Maine island for their power, which is made by three diesel generators.
Before the advent of the municipal company, Monhegan’s electricity was provided by a private company. “He had a good idea,” Boegel says of Ray Remick, the owner-operator of the private company that began more than a decade ago. “It just got too big for him. He wanted to give us central power and he did, so by the time he left the island and stopped maintaining the plant, we were all dependent on it.”
Remick understandably grew tired of running the long gantlet of state and federal regulations and permits, said Boegel. Islanders decided against a co-op, believing it would be even more costly, hired consultants to help with grants and voted to create a municipal power district.
“By then we were in crisis mode, so we couldn’t consider alternative power sources,” Boegel explained. “But we have a hybrid system so we can add renewables.” A grant to try solar power proved unworkable for Monhegan residents who decided connecting rooftop panels would not be cost-effective.
“Crisis mode” meant frequent power outages as the old generators gave up the ghost, and rented generators, not designed for such heavy usage, pooped out on a regular basis. “Lots of times the power was just going on and off all the time,” Boegel recalls.
Things are different now. The new plant building has been completed. Three generators – one is a backup – are now humming away, automatically synchronized to switch from one to another to save fuel as the load increases or drops. A $500,000 federal grant has allowed Monhegan to start replacing the old power lines with a new distribution system that could be completed by spring.
On Matinicus, Paul Murray has been taking care of the power plant for Matinicus Plantation Electric Company since 1982.
“Any job you do on an island, if you’re not a lobsterman, is part-time,” said Murray. Besides maintaining the generators for the power company, Murray repairs lines for the phone company, and opens and closes cottages for seasonal residents.
“We’re not connected to the mainland, so we sink or swim on our own,” Murray said. “We have a diesel generating system with three main engines.” As on Monhegan, automatic sensors switch between the two regular engines for fuel efficiency when loads increase or decrease.
“We have only a couple of outages a year. Usually, a line problem, ice or a tree down,” Murray explains. It’s rare for the carefully-maintained engines to have a problem. The third and larger engine is the alternate source when Murray takes the two regular engines off-line to work on them.
Matinicus has generated central power since 1964, but back then, the power was pumped out by small generators “like a household would have,” said Murray. The island replaced that system with larger generators in 1977, and upgraded to the new, more automated system in 1983.
To keep their monthly bills averaging around $100, Matinicus residents all use propane cookstoves, most use oil or propane hot water heaters, and many use propane clothes dryers. Summer residents’ monthly bills average a bit higher, perhaps around $150, said Murray. The power company serves 40 households at the lowest point in winter, up to 150 during the peak summer season.
Generating power, getting grants and loans to build buildings – it’s all pretty costly and time-consuming stuff that takes years to accomplish. The advantage of generating power on islands is twofold: no cables to break and no loss of power when the big grid suffers a problem as in the recent blackout that left Maine unscathed, but which affected other large regions of the northeastern U.S. and Canada.
The undersea cable option
All of the Casco Bay islands are served by Central Maine Power Company, all have buried cables and all pay the same rates as mainlanders. However, one island with only one household paid plenty to get the power there, says CMP Portland service center manager Joseph Purington. CMP serves 2,000 households on Peaks, Chebeague, Long, Hope, Cliff, Cushing, Great Diamond and Little Diamond.
In Penobscot Bay, Islesboro gets its power through an undersea cable, which is only buried for the nearshore 100 feet of its three-mile length. The cable has experienced no problem with trawlers, being only three miles offshore and not in prime fishing grounds. On Islesboro, CMP is Fred Rollins.
“I’m the one who lives here and keeps the power on,” says Rollins. If a tree blows down in a wet cold snow on a freezing night, while his neighbors stoke the wood stove and light candles, Rollins is out looking for the broken line to repair.
Outages mostly occur now in fall’s high winds or winter’s ice and snow storms, and rarely last more than an hour or two, Rollins says. Until CMP built a substation in Lincolnville Center, however, outages were more frequent. “We used to bring the power up Route One and we would get more outages than now, because cars would hit poles.”
Cables from Islesboro also supply power to 700-Acre Island and Seal Island. Like Casco Bay islanders, customers for the 800 accounts on these three islands, about half of which are year-round, pay the same rates as mainland CMP accounts.
Line and equipment repairs on islands are more difficult due to the “ferry factor,” meaning a longer wait for materials, says Rollins. Cable repairs are difficult by their nature, since they involve hiring a mainland company with barges to lift the cable off the bottom to allow CMP workers to fix the problem. Naturally, most cable problems occur in winter.
North Haven and Vinalhaven have cables, which have had “numerous failures since 1996,” says David Folce, manager of the Fox Island Electric Company, which provides power to those islands.
“We’re replacing the submarine cable,” said Folce. Like Swan’s Island, Fox Island Electric Company is a member-owned co-op. “The cable has to be replaced for the reliability of island power.”
Reliability is something residents on these islands will welcome. The present cables were trouble-free from 1978 to 1996, but when the problems began, they never stopped.
“Failures have increased each year. In 2002, we had seven power failures. Already this year (by early October), we have had five. Four times, we lost two cables at once.”
The problem? “Abrasion,” says Folce. That’s his polite way of saying that most of the cable breaks were caused by trawlers. “In 25 years, only two were ‘electrical’ failures, or internal breakdowns of the cable. The rest were ‘external.’ But it wasn’t just trawlers. It was anchors, too. Everybody took a little of the blame.”
Fox Islands will bury the new cables to avoid ‘abrasion,’ but it’s a costly option – roughly $6.1 million – with another set of regulations and permits. If a problem does occur with the buried cable, it’s also more expensive to fix. In the long run, obviously, co-op members expect the buried cables to require fewer repairs and keep the lights on longer.
Meanwhile, to make the buried cable a reality, Folce has been busy writing grant proposals to the Rural Electrification Administration, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. So far, USDA has given Fox Islands $2.6 million in grants “with help from Senators Snowe and Collins and Rep. Tom Allen… we couldn’t have done it without them.” The company is also eligible for a low-interest “hardship loan” available for rural areas with exceptionally high power costs.
Fox Islands hired a consultant to guide the company through the convoluted permitting process. They completed an environmental impact study and are working on a side-scan of the cable route so they can inform all the lobstermen of the disruption when the cable is buried. They will have an archeologist on board for the survey to watch out for old wooden shipwrecks.
“We’ve had marine biologists out here, we’ve surveyed land use and flood plains, history, points of interest, fish and wildlife, threatened species, prime and unique farm and forest areas, aesthetics, transportation, human health and safety, socio-economic and community resources, and more,” said Folce. “We contacted the different Maine Indian tribes to make sure we were not disturbing any of their sites. The permits are all in.”
Fox Islands buys its power from Exelon Energy out of Pennsylvania, the low bidder chosen by the board of directors to provide electricity to its 1,800 accounts.
When the two islands had their own power plant, until 1978, “We were hard-pressed to have more than a few hours of power at a time,” said Phil Crossman, owner of Vinalhaven’s Tidewater Motel. “We called it ‘hour power,’ ” he recalls. “I remember one guy who was making lasagna, forgetting that our power would be turned off soon. When the power went out, he went over to North Haven to finish it off.”
Three years ago, while the new cable was still far away and outages were frequent, Crossman began work to install a Gorlov Helical Turbine under his seaside motel. The turbine, designed by a Russian immigrant, Alexander Gorlov, who teaches at Northeastern University in Boston, is said to resemble the DNA double helix.
“He worked on the Aswan Dam,” Crossman said of Gorlov. “He was thrown out of Russia with Alexander Solzhenitsin. They were good friends.” The three-turbine system is installed under the motel in an 18-by-3-foot cage that can swing out of the way when boats go through.
In October, Crossman was awaiting only the new generator that would attach to the turbine before turning it on, hoping to reduce the annual $14,000 power bill for his business by one-third.
Meanwhile, while filling out forms for permits, loans and grants, a year ago Folce found time to install an anemometer to measure wind speed and direction. The device is connected to a data logger, a small chip that stores the data that is then sent to a University of Massachusetts renewable energy program. UMass is conducting a feasibility study for Fox Islands, paid for by another grant, to see if between one and six utility-scale wind turbines could be placed on the island’s high points to provide power.
“They could be spread out, not like a wind farm,” said Folce. “One or two could supply both islands if they were on all the time.” Of course, nature being fickle, the turbines would not always be turning, and Fox Islands isn’t considering costly power storage, but selling excess power when energy production is high, and relying on the cables for power when winds are low.
“These cables will allow us to expand for the next 40 years,” said Folce. Wind power could reduce the electricity rates, however, which increased twice in one year, and are now at 28.9 cents per KWH, and due to increase 4 percent when the cable project is completed a year from now.
“I know wind turbines will be an issue both visually and for birds,” Folce says. But the technology is being refined all the time to make them safer for birds and less visible to people. “We’re so far out, they should be barely visible from shore or boats” and the trees are so thick, they’ll be invisible on the island.
“I tell people wind power is just like sailing,” adds Folce. “It’s free energy.”
Swan’s, Frenchboro and scallop draggers
Swan’s Island Electric Co-op has fewer than 500 customers and four employees. The co-op began in 1950 and generated its own power for years. In 1973, the co-op switched to an undersea cable and began buying power from Bangor Hydro.
Like North Haven and Vinalhaven, Swan’s Island, five miles offshore, has cable problems.
“Up until the last couple of years, we had cable breaks almost annually,” said Lorraine Stockbridge, general manager of the co-op. “Three years ago, three cables busted.”
Swan’s Island now has four cables from the mainland, the fourth for backup. (The year of the three-cable bust, there were only three cables.)
“They all broke within a month or so, so we couldn’t get one repaired before another broke,” says Stockbridge. Three-phase, or heavy users, had to use generators to keep power running during the siege. Fortunately, it was February, the time of the smallest power use. Unfortunately, it was also the time of year when cable repair is harder.
The first time, the co-op called then Sen. Jill Goldthwait, who helped get the National Guard to bring generators to the island and stay around to maintain them. The second time, the Guard couldn’t go, so the co-op rented generators from a Bangor company. The entire, two-episode, three-cable event last about three weeks, reports Stockbridge.
In fact, she recalls, “The new cable wasn’t even hooked up and they broke it.”
“They” means scallop draggers. Although the cable area is restricted and marked on charts, draggers still manage to tow their dredges across the cable, break it and escape without being caught. One boat was apprehended once and confiscated by the authorities. But another boat caught three years ago was sold before the case came to court. If cable breaks did not occur during the past two years, Stockbridge says it’s because fewer scallopers have been around.
“We buried the cable from Swan’s to Frenchboro nearly 10 years ago. It was a big success. It’s never been damaged,” says Stockbridge. “But it’s a costly thing, with pros and cons. We buried one of the four from the mainland to Swan’s, but to bury the other three, we would have to get grants.”
Swan’s Islanders now pay 22 cents per KWH, or an average of $100 to $120 a month per household, “mostly to run furnaces.” The coop still owns its old generators but Stockbridge says they couldn’t handle the load any more when the cables go down. Because of the frequency of cable problems, many islanders have their own generators.
As for alternatives such as tidal or wind power, Stockbridge says, “We are still looking. If something came up that made sense for us, we’d consider it.”