Rumford Falls Times - letter to the editor 9/28/11

To the editor,
As Angus King's enormous turbines continue to sprawl across the formerly beautiful ridgelines of Partridge Peak and Flathead Mountain in Roxbury, residents throughout the River Valley should have a good idea about what is in store for a mountain near them. If wind projects currently proposed for Carthage, Dixfield, Rumford, Woodstock, Sumner, Canton, Roxbury, and Byron are built there will be hundreds of turbines, on every horizon.

What does the River Valley get in return for the sacrifice of its mountains? Not much. For wind power to be a useful source of electricity there must be a way for the grid to store it, since it is undependable and cannot be relied on to produce power when the grid needs it. Conventional sources must be kept running even when wind is available because no one knows when the wind will stop and the grid must keep the lights on. So wind turbines do not replace conventional generation on a 1 to 1 basis as Mr. King claims. They simply drive the price of electricity higher, because the grid is required by politics, not by science, to purchase wind power whenever it is available, even if other generators must keep running in the background. Economical grid scale storage does not exist and will not exist in the lifetime of any turbines being constructed today.

Mr. King has claimed repeatedly that his turbines will "help get us off of foreign oil". While this sounds believable it is simply not true. Even if wind generation made sense, electricity is not produced by burning foreign oil. In Maine 50% of our electricity is produced by homegrown hydro and biomass. The rest comes from relatively clean burning domestic natural gas. Maine should be proud that its electricity generation is among the cleanest in the country. Mr. King has abused people's gullibility to exploit them for his personal gain.

Likewise folks should resist the claim that wind turbines will substantially reduce their property taxes or provide any other long term benefit. There is no proof that this will happen, just as there is no proof that turbines will have any environmental benefit. If the massive subsidies provided to the wind developers dry up they will turn their sights on the next "big thing" and we will be left with useless abandoned turbines.

As is evident from what is happening in Roxbury, turbines simply destroy the natural beauty of the area, replacing the cherished silouhette of the mountain against the sky with an industrial landscape of giant whirligigs. Our mountains cease to be mountains. They become nothing more than pedestals for wind turbines. What a travesty if we allow this to happen.

Steve Thurston
Roxbury Pond

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Comment by alice mckay barnett on October 3, 2011 at 7:04pm
we did..now what?   education?  scenic hughway 17

 

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/

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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/

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