Discussions with leaders in our state or nation’s capitals almost always revolve around developing policies that will shape our future. I guess that’s why we call the people we meet in our capitals “policy makers.” In contrast, discussions in Maine’s island communities almost always revolve around how to test a new idea or a new approach to an old idea. Tinkerers, you might say, or boat builders constantly making small improvements to the shape of a hull, or fishermen modifying a piece of gear. Islanders believe in trial and error strategies to improve community life; policy makers believe in implementing broad strategies to improve the life of the state or the nation. Perhaps this explains why there seems to be such a big disconnect between the nation’s capital and our small towns and rural hinterlands.
We returned recently from Washington where we met with an official from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) about a small project George Baker of Fox Islands Wind and the Island Energy Task Force (a community group on Vinalhaven) have been running. I call it the “heat from wind” project; on the Fox Islands it is known as the Island Affordable Energy Project. The idea is that, rather than sell the excess wind energy via the submarine cable on the mainland at low wholesale rates, why not use that energy to heat island homes when the wind is blowing hard in the winter? Of course, to accomplish this, you would have to know when the wind is blowing hard enough to produce excess power. And you would also have to control electric heaters to turn them on when the total electric supply is greater than the total local demand, and then turn them back off when the wind is not blowing hard enough. It turns out that the substation at Glen Cove, where the island submarine cable comes ashore, already collects this information. But then you would need to develop a control technology that turns electric heaters on and off according to the fluctuating electric load at Glen Cove. It turns out this type of “smart grid” technology has already been developed by a young entrepreneur-for slightly different purposes-and could be adapted to the Fox Islands’ situation. Finally you would need electric heaters with specially designed bricks to store thermal energy when the wind is blowing and release it slowly after the wind dies down. And it turns out that this is the kind of heater developed by a company in North Dakota-Steffes-for their region, which also has wind turbines and cold winters.
Fox Islands Wind and the Island Institute were able to raise a small fistful of dollars to test this approach in six homes and businesses on the two islands during the past few months. The preliminary results have gotten us pretty excited about the possibility of reducing the high cost of fossil fuel heat on Maine’s islands since participants were able to reduce their supplemental heating costs by between 44 and 47 percent during the month of April. But it is not just Maine’s islands that could benefit. The Ocean Energy Task Force has recommended this same approach for all of Maine if we are to harness the prodigious wind resources offshore. One of the problems with offshore wind in the Gulf of Maine-and of course there are many-is that all the power has to go some place. If we send the electricity southwards toward the major metropolitan areas like Boston, very expensive transmission lines will have to be built that make the development economics all that more difficult. But if Maine develops our own smart grid here, we could use excess electric energy more efficiently in the winter for home heating and for plugging in electric cars, which is a much more attractive proposition for all concerned.
It is as if the Fox Islands project could serve as a pilot for the whole state of Maine.
We were therefore pretty excited to be talking to DOE in Washington. But I cannot report that this tiny (by national standards) pilot project on Vinalhaven and North Haven has yet to light up the capital skies.
Smart grid policy is just now being developed by policy makers in the Department and it is uncertain what direction it will take. And then there is the matter about the small size of even a fully scaled island project with “only” 2,000 electric ratepayers. And so forth. But another part of DOE, the National Energy Research Lab in Colorado, has been interested and helpful in terms of helping to analyze noise mitigation strategies (see “Wind power experts visit Vinalhaven,” pg. 17). So the islands’ renewable energy agenda has not struck out.
It seems, however, that the national dialog might improve if, instead of focusing almost exclusively on developing a national policy framework for say, smart grids, we were to start tinkering with lots of different designs to see what works on the ground in real communities. People get a lot less nervous about testing ideas at a community scale where they can have input before implementing national programs, especially when the consequences of big programs are impossible to predict.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.