While the rest of the United States is feeling the pain of rapidly increased fuel prices, rural Maine is in far more desperate shape and island Maine is in the most vulnerable predicament of all American communities outside perhaps of Alaska. On Maine islands, fuel prices have already exceeded $5 a gallon for heating and transportation. Electricity this year, based on fossil fuel generation, costs between two and three times the rate on the mainland. The islands’ primary economy is based on a lobster business model that depends on plentiful supplies of cheap fuel and bait. Everyone has heard of the canary in the coalmine metaphor; islanders are canaries in the oil patch. How Maine islanders respond to their new world over the next few years will determine whether these communities can survive as something other than summer communities for the privileged.
Maine in general and rural Maine in particular confronts an expensive energy future due to a number of inconvenient facts: Maine has the highest percentage of homes heated by fuel oil of any state in the country; over 40 percent of our electricity is generated from purchases of increasingly expensive natural gas; our population is dispersed into small communities distant from the centers of production for food and fuel, making these commodities more expensive in the best of times. In sum, we import virtually everything we heat and eat.
But we do not need to go gently into that particular night, since we have another option.
This past legislative session, Maine enshrined into law a new energy policy, something our leaders in Washington might eventually seek to emulate. Maine set a goal of developing 2,000 megawatts of electricity by 2015 and 3,000 megawatts by 2020 from our abundant wind power resources and zoned almost half of rural Maine for expedited regulatory review for wind power development.
Most everyone appreciates that the wind blows hard across Maine’s remote mountains and ridges. Fewer recognize that the Maine coast has an even more abundant resource. However, since most people, including members of the Governor’s Wind Power Task Force, think of the Maine coast as a summer playground, they seemed to believe that wind turbines could never be erected on the Maine coast due to aesthetic objections to tall towers that might mar the views of powerful vested interests.
During the past year, the Island Institute played a very small role in the Governor’s Wind Power Task Force as a consequence of working with the island electric co-ops serving Vinalhaven, North Haven, Swan’s Island and Frenchboro. These island communities have been developing local wind power plans to reduce their dependence on electric rates that are two and a half times higher than on the mainland, in order to maintain viable year-round communities.
The co-ops’ efforts took off in recent months after a Harvard Business School professor on sabbatical, Dr. George Baker, analyzed the economics of the plan, found them to be fundamentally sound and developed an innovative package of financial investment incentives that could make the project a reality perhaps as early as next spring. As a result, the Fox Islands Electric Co-operative is reviewing a business plan that has attracted between $4 and $5 million of initial investments for a $10-$12 million proposal to erect two large, state-of-the-art turbines on a ridgeline toward the northern end Vinalhaven, two to three miles from the Fox Islands Thorofare. Co-op members (meaning every rate payer, summer and winter, on the two islands) will have the opportunity to ask questions of Baker and co-op directors at two public meetings, on North Haven and Vinalhaven, in July. Following the annual meeting of the co-op membership July 28 on Vinalhaven, the co-op board will decide whether to proceed with the plan and submit it to the Vinalhaven planning board for a permit under the island’s new wind power development ordinance.
Plenty of unforeseen events could interrupt this timetable – securing the remaining financing, the availability of turbines, the Vinalhaven planning board permit process and the possibility of lengthy delays if the atmosphere turns litigious, among others. On the other hand, if this project can be permitted, the Maine coast will be near the top of the list for wind developers interested in siting other wind power development projects that could be staged on and around Maine’s year-round island communities.
Islanders often reminisce about the days of merchant sail, when economically self-sufficient island communities were on the major east-west and north-south routes of commerce. Island populations were two to four times as large as they are today because the islands’ economies were sustained by commerce that captured a portion of our wind resources and connected Maine’s ships and natural resources with the rest of the East Coast and then the world.
Now close your eyes and imagine this: the islands and shallow waters of the coast of Maine have attracted significant investment from entrepreneurs who have re-captured a portion of the coast’s abundant wind resources and converted them into electric power for the commercial markets of the East Coast, displacing foreign sources of oil. Single wind turbines turn on a handful of offshore islands. There are another half-dozen wind farms in waters less than 100 feet deep, generating anywhere from several hundred to several thousand megawatts of energy, summer and winter, the year round. Island populations and economies have substantially benefited from servicing this new (old) wind industry.
And now ask yourself this: is this your worst nightmare or your fondest dream? – because you and your neighbors and the rest of the citizens of this country will absolutely be asked to choose what kind of energy we want. And “none of the above” is not a viable answer.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.