The Natural Resources Council of Maine walks a fine line — trying to be supportive of clean energy while standing up for wildlife, land protection and other environmental quality. Though the overall impacts of wind power are always fewer than fossil-powered generation, all energy generation has some impacts.
Wind developers are not always happy with NRCM's decisions. The bottom line is that there is a lot of context and data that needs to be considered before decisions are made about particular projects.
Wildlife and human health impacts of wind power are negligible when compared to most energy alternatives. Efficiency improvements to eliminate energy usage are the only exception. While we need to reduce our energy use, we cannot make it all go away. Therefore, low-impact options such as wind are needed.
Not all mountains are created equal. Just because one happens to be in, or visible from a town does not make it special or in need of special protection. Wind turbines do not belong on every mountain ridge, but there are certainly some, where clean energy production is a good idea. Wind power does reduce the amount of fossil fuels needed to make the electricity that we must use.
Life requires trade-offs. Protecting land or providing benefits to local communities is sometimes part of a wind project package.
I believe that it is time to stop looking for evil plots where none exist. We need to focus on the good that wind power is accomplishing in Maine.
Dick Hall, Portland
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Mr. Hall your just trying to save your job
What we couldn't see coming was that the logging industry and the industrial wind turbine industry would decide to walk hand in hand across the mountain tops of Maine. It is time that people understand that they are doing major ecological damage to the land by literally stripping the trees, blasting the mountain tops and who cares about the herbicides being used or how it affects the spring waters that flow from these mountains. Maine has worked hard to clean up its water and now we are asked to just accept the new damages for Progress? I don't think so. You may think by ignoring us we will go away, but at the same time we are praying that your scam will be found out before anymore damage can be done. Just admit it, this wind turbine electricity is not to benefit Maine, it is to benefit Massachusetts. I don't like the idea of you saying it is "good for Mainers", when the the reason the turbines are going up in Maine is because the people of Massachusetts won't put them in their backyard.
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Maine Drilling and Blasting is about to start transfiguring Saddleback Mountain in Carthage, Mr. Hall. My father's ashes are on that mountain. It is sacred to me and to many others as well, tho I would hazard to guess that you really don't care much about Maine's mountains or her rural residents. If Maine is going to "trade off" its secenic viewsheds, which also happen to be a huge ecnomic treasure for our tourism based economy, all for the sake of a few sporadic electrons, I call that a very poor trade. If you could back up your claims as to industrial wind reducing our fossil fuel usage, that would be most interesting. I don't know of any existing power plants that have been shut down because of wind turbine installations. Nor do I know of one single Maine household being powered by industrial wind projects here in Maine. Another thing,given that wind quality is fair to poor and by its nature very sporadic in Maine, and given that these turbine blades weigh over seven tons a piece, explain why they're turning when there's no wind blowing? How hard does the wind have to be blowing to get these massive blades turning? How much of a parasitic draw are these industrial turbines on our existing grid? Lots of questions, not many answers. I call industrial wind a damned poor trade no matter how you cut it. I'll take natural gas and hydro any day.
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First of all, it galls me every time someone who derives financial gain from wind spins out the deceit about wind power without disclosing their professional or financial interest. Dick Hall's background is pointed out by the comment here by Monique Aniel.
Me? Just a citizen who has hiked every mile of the Appalachian Trail in Maine, hiked a vast majority of the mountains with trails and some that are trail-less, and I grew up in the northeastern uplands that the state is rapidly allowing to become the domain of First Wind. In my experience, I would put all ridge tops in the state of Maine off limits to the blasting and leveling of hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of ridges that occur every time one of these sprawling, environmentally destructive wind sites gets developed. Wind projects, Mr. Hall, are NOT LOW IMPACT!
The cumulative impact of building out the state's goal of 2700 MW of installed capacity of wind by 2020, contained in the most heinous law I've witnessed in my lifetime in Maine---the Expedited Wind Permitting statute---is horrendous! Based on what has already been built out, we can project that it will be 40 to 50 projects, destroying 350 miles of Maine's uplands, permanently clearcutting over 50,000 acres of carbon-sequestering forest, and more than 1,000 miles of new powerlines criss-crossing our beautiful state to connect to the $1.4 billion expanded transmission trunk line that is being built only for wind projects.
At the measly 25% capacity factor that we are seeing as the most production out of these wind turbines, because according to NREL Maine has poor to marginal wind potential, that comes to 675 MW of unpredictable, unreliable surges of grid-skittering wind power that ISO New England doesn't even include for its base load or base load following daily needs. If we need 675 MW of new power, just one other natural gas plant like the one in Westbrook sitting on less than 100 acres of an industrial park is a more environmentally benign and economically sensible solution than wind power.
Wind power is a scam. It is bad for the environment but wind shills like you never tell the truth about it.
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In your self-serving backyard!
Wind Power will be about as low impact to Maine's economy as a bullet to ones head!
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a quick search of Dick Hall in Portland shows us this person( see below).
Could the Sun Journal for the sake of fairness confirm whether the Dick Hall who wrote this letter is the same as the Dick Hall with the following profile.
Thank You
Monique Aniel www.windtaskforce.org
Dick Hall
Senior Engineer at SGC Engineering LLC
Location
Portland, Maine Area
Industry
Utilities
Dick Hall's Overview
Current Senior Engineer at SGC Engineering, LLC, a part of Senergy
Past Environmental Manager at National Semiconductor
Education Boston University - School of Management
University of Maine
Connections 69 connections
Dick Hall's Summary
Project manager for utility scale wind projects in New England
Project manager for consultant to electric transmission upgrade project in NH and VT.
Project Manager for Pre-FEED study of offshore transmission lines to connect to offshore wind farms on the east coast of the USA.
Business development for Senergy Alternative Energy, specifically relating to offshore wind energy in the USA.
Professional Engineer with 30 years of technical, managerial, negotiation and regulatory compliance experience, including 15 years as an Environmental Health and Safety specialist
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The problem is your a city dweller. The NIYBY's are all for other sources of power, as long as they are not in their area. They do not realize that no matter where power or fuel comes from it is in somebodies back yard.
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Would you like to respond? Login or create a new account. You'll need to verify your account before you can respond.Put an Industrial Wind Project in Portland, Mr. Hall!
I grew up in Lincoln Lakes, north of Bangor, which has the 40 turbines of First Wind's Rollins Project. These are the "small" industrial scale turbines, topping out at 389 feet tall, nearly twice as tall as Portland's Franklin Towers, at 202 feet tall, the tallest building in Maine. More recent proposals for wind projects include turbines up to 465 feet from base to apex of the blade sweep.
If we could relocate the Rollins project off the 7 miles of blasted and destroyed ridges above the lovely 13 Lincoln Lakes to Portland, the windsprawl would take up every public space in metro Portland: They would line Back Cove, dominate Payson Park, Deering Oaks, Western & Eastern Prom, MillCreek Park and Bug Light Park in South Portland and Ft. Williams Park in Cape Elizabeth. That, city dwellers who have been "greenwashed" with the idea that wind power development is good, is the visual and space condemnation inflicted on every place where an industrial wind site has been approved.
But that will never happen. Portland just passed a wind ordinance making installation of such behemoth machines impossible; Cape Elizabeth has had such an ordinance for 5 years. The irony is that there is much more wind potential along the coast than on the ridges of Lincoln Lakes or any other uplands in the interior targeted for destructive windsprawl. Yet just one small group, PEAT on Peak's Island, has ever told the truth that wind is not economically viable, even with subsidies and RECs. At the end of 2010, the group that wanted to bring wind power to Peak's Island, publically disclosed the data they had gathered and concluded that the wind potential was not enough to justify the investment. Smart, honest people like Sam Saltonstall had enough integrity to tell the truth, unlike wind shill Dick Hall, who wants to perteptuate the wind scam because he profits from it.
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Correction NIMBY's
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You should also correct:
"The problem is your a city dweller. "
your --> you're
"The NIYBY's are all..."
NIMBYS (no apostrophe)
"...in somebodies back yard."
somebody's (with apostrophe) and backyard (one word)
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