Maine inshore wind wannabes try to spin their legislative Waterloo.

The Baldacci administration is working to put the best spin on the peeling away of all the state waters windfarm incentives from their ocean energy task force bill LD 1810.

An

essay rushed into print by Beth Nagusky and by former Maine Lobsterman's Association Pat White, now a wind energy spokesman states flatly:


"There is nothing to prevent a developer of offshore wind, wave or tidal power from proposing a project in Maine state waters today."


If Nagusky and White are proudly announcing a new era of inshore wind development, then what curiously apologetic defensive language to use! In essence: We can't stop 'em.

Their op-ed

"Passage of ocean energy bill the responsible step"

was penned after LD 1810 the Ocean Energy Task Force bill was finalized March 24th by the Utility and Energy Committee.


'We can't stop 'em!' they shrug It is...almost... true. But NOT at all in the way the essayists intended. Let me explain why this bill is very good news for Maine's wild marine environment. Why I got a delicious sense of deja vu when I read that "nothing to prevent" line.


For that "nothing to prevent" line is exactly what they said a year ago at Energy Ocean 09 in last June, the Maine Offshore Energy Conference in September and earlier this month at the wind seminar at the Maine Fishermens Forum: "There is nothing to prevent a developer of offshore wind, wave or tidal power from proposing a project in Maine state waters today."


Meaning that Maine's existing submerged lands leasing law is general enough that anyone can apply for a lease to build anything, including a windfarm, in state waters right now. Without any changes in state law.


True enough. In fact, you could apply under that law for a lease to build anything in Maine state waters. Say, a floating circus big tent, with a big seahorse aquaculture operation on the side -the trained ocean equines to pull it around in state waters. You can apply for a lease to try ANYTHING. The Bureau of Parks and Lands will be pleased to take your application fees. But don't expect any special bending of the rules.

For as is known to victims of landside windfarming, without a fat package of tax incentives, corporate welfare and immunity from environmental and conservation laws, the wind industry won't come in and squat on your natural resources. That's what the legislature gave Big Wind last time, when they opened up Maine's mountains to windfarming, and the industry has exploited it ruthlessly.


The result: windfarm proposal after proposal rushed into Augusta for approval, and ever since, under a dense cloud of opposition in the courts and other civic arenas, utility scale wind projects, flanked by join-em-if-you-can't-lick-'em NGOs like Conservation Law Foundation, Natural Resources Council of Maine, parts of Maine Audubon, Sierra Club and others, all feasting on industry-fronted grant and consultancy money, have begun cluttering Maine's incredible upland mountains.

Addicted to incentive money, thus yearning for new frontiers, Big Wind's investors looked appraisingly at the sea. They worked with the Baldacci administration to create a bill packed with the same incentives to build windfarms in state waters: corporate welfare, lots of fat fees to keep the agencies happy, immunity from environmental laws, the right to 'take' coastal land to run their cables through to the grid, the stripping towns of municipal authority to challenge windfarms in their borders...the usual nasties.


But they overlooked three things: One: that this bill also directed the state to force the closing down of the heating oil industry and its replacement by electric heating; Two: that in addition to state waters, the bill also deals with setting up corparate welfare for OFFSHORE windfarming - in federal & EEZ waters beyond the Maine's marine boundary. Three: that, unlike land windfarms, ocean windfarms would be in public lands heavily exploited by a variety of important businesses already licensed to be there, perfectly willing to fight to the death this proposed incursion into their economic futures.

But the dazzle and wealth of the Big Windies convinced the Baldacci administration that they could just shove the heating industry, the fishermen, the sailors and coastal tourism industries aside.
So up comes the bill LD 1810 with great fanfare, with acclamations that fishermen, heating oil suppliers and others were to patriotically give up great chunks of their customer base and their fishing grounds to enrich absentee corporate investors to fight global warming.

Didn't fly. The oilers, the fishermen and the other marine resource economic interests began to bite back. With testimony en masse. With letters, with petitions, phone calls and emails. Good old fashioned civics in action. Simple clear message: you legislators must not destroy our livelihoods. Bad bill! Bad bill! And the legislators, including House Speaker Hannah Pingree, Marine Resource Committee chair Leila Percy and many others, including those on the Utility and Energy Committee - got the message loud and clear, and start to hem and haw.

That was bad enough to the inshore windmill wannabes. But then they got another unpleasant shock: The offshore wind developers at the University of Maine saw the legislators looking askance at state waters windmills. They started worrying that corporate welfare for their baby - also in the bill LD1810 - could go out with the inshore bathwater! So the academics too started dissing state waters windmillery as stupid. As an economic hardship for existing state waters users. As unbecoming for a state like Maine, which is now on the track to LEAD the nation with over-the-horizon floating offshore windfarming.

This surprise attack by what the inshore windies thought were their offshore allies stiffened the legislators' resolve. They set about cutting away the incentive package for state waters windmill stuff, to the great joy of the Maine Lobstermens Association, whose executive director Patrice McCarron helped the committee go over the bill with a finetoothed comb deleting the inshore wind benefits package, even to removal of a line extolling inshore windfarming in the "Whereases" section of the bill.

Cleansed of its inshore wind kerflufflery, the bill passed the committee unanimously So inshore wind development in Maine is back to the default we had BEFORE the hearings and the bill. As Ms. Nagusky and Mr. White intone:

"There is nothing to prevent a developer of offshore wind, wave or tidal power from proposing a project in Maine state waters today."

Aye. "Nothing" as in No corporate welfare for inshore wind. No suspension of environmental laws for inshore wind, No requirement that Maine utilities must purchase power from inshore wind developers. Not a thing. Nothing.

So indeed, "Nothing (i.e. the absence of govt handouts) is preventing a developer of offshore wind, wave or tidal power "from proposing a project in Maine state waters today." May it always be so.


There remains authorization for the state to accept lease applications for a pilot wind and tidal projects in state waters, but only tiny R&D projects.

Bob Dylan said it: "When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose."

Views: 88

Comment

You need to be a member of Citizens' Task Force on Wind Power - Maine to add comments!

Join Citizens' Task Force on Wind Power - Maine

Comment by Ron Huber on March 28, 2010 at 3:59pm
Go to the maine mediawatch blog and add you comments to the most recent post It is about the Island Insitute editorial and how PPH also manages to screw the ocean wind energy story up.
Comment by Ron Huber on March 28, 2010 at 3:02pm
Maine offshore wind bill: Here is a link to all the audio from
1. 3/6/10 Maine Fishermens' Forum: Seminar on Maine fishermen and offshore wind
2. 3/11/10 Maine Legislature's Utility & Energy Committee Public Hearing on LD 1810
3. 3/18/10 Utility & Energy Committee worksession # 1 on LD 1810
4. 3/23/10 Utility & Energy Committee work session # 2 on LD 1810
5. 3/24/10 Utility & Energy Committees work session # 3 on LD 1810 (Final version of LD 1810 .
Comment by Ron Huber on March 28, 2010 at 2:56pm
Scarlett you are absolutely right. One thing is to get coastal towns to adopt town waters-protective ordinances. The hedgehog defense. Need someone from upland areas that can explain this to people facing windmills in public waters.
Comment by Scarlett on March 28, 2010 at 10:33am
let's not get complacent about this deferral of pressure on coastal wind development....Neptune Wind, and other companies, will be back, if indeed they ever really left. They've learned a lot from the recent experience here. But there's still too much money to be made from wind development in New England for them to give it up so easily. I'd rather see the small R&D projects, which will hopefully provide more answers than questions, than the commercial 'blue-light-specials' that the Baldacci/OETF has been offering to wind energy developers.
Comment by Ron Huber on March 26, 2010 at 11:54pm
hahahahahHhha
Comment by Long Islander on March 26, 2010 at 11:50pm

 

Maine as Third World Country:

CMP Transmission Rate Skyrockets 19.6% Due to Wind Power

 

Click here to read how the Maine ratepayer has been sold down the river by the Angus King cabal.

Maine Center For Public Interest Reporting – Three Part Series: A CRITICAL LOOK AT MAINE’S WIND ACT

******** IF LINKS BELOW DON'T WORK, GOOGLE THEM*********

(excerpts) From Part 1 – On Maine’s Wind Law “Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine if the law’s goals were met." . – Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, August 2010 https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/From Part 2 – On Wind and Oil Yet using wind energy doesn’t lower dependence on imported foreign oil. That’s because the majority of imported oil in Maine is used for heating and transportation. And switching our dependence from foreign oil to Maine-produced electricity isn’t likely to happen very soon, says Bartlett. “Right now, people can’t switch to electric cars and heating – if they did, we’d be in trouble.” So was one of the fundamental premises of the task force false, or at least misleading?" https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-swept-task-force-set-the-rules/From Part 3 – On Wind-Required New Transmission Lines Finally, the building of enormous, high-voltage transmission lines that the regional electricity system operator says are required to move substantial amounts of wind power to markets south of Maine was never even discussed by the task force – an omission that Mills said will come to haunt the state.“If you try to put 2,500 or 3,000 megawatts in northern or eastern Maine – oh, my god, try to build the transmission!” said Mills. “It’s not just the towers, it’s the lines – that’s when I begin to think that the goal is a little farfetched.” https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/flaws-in-bill-like-skating-with-dull-skates/

Not yet a member?

Sign up today and lend your voice and presence to the steadily rising tide that will soon sweep the scourge of useless and wretched turbines from our beloved Maine countryside. For many of us, our little pieces of paradise have been hard won. Did the carpetbaggers think they could simply steal them from us?

We have the facts on our side. We have the truth on our side. All we need now is YOU.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

 -- Mahatma Gandhi

"It's not whether you get knocked down: it's whether you get up."
Vince Lombardi 

Task Force membership is free. Please sign up today!

Hannah Pingree on the Maine expedited wind law

Hannah Pingree - Director of Maine's Office of Innovation and the Future

"Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine."

https://pinetreewatch.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/

© 2024   Created by Webmaster.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service