SteveThurston's letter to the Energy ,Utilities and Technology Committee

I sent the following email today to each member of the Energy, Technology and Utilities Committee as a follow up to my testimony at their open house on January 13th.   This committee will be the gatekeeper for any legislation dealing with wind power. 
 

Dear Members of the Energy, Utilities and Technology Committee,

Thank you for your kind attention during the Energy portion of your committee's "open house"  on Thursday, January 13th.   Representative Fitts and Representative du Houx asked for additional information to elaborate upon the remarks I made during my brief presentation.  I hope you find the following information helpful. 

Representative Fitts asked for written comments, which I am providing here,  and Representative du Houx asked about my statement that the life cycle cost of electricity from wind turbines is $150 per megawatt.   The wind industry lobby will not reveal the actual cost of producing electricity with wind turbines,  but the US Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (EIA) published a report in 2010 which contains a table of "levelized electricity prices" which the table shows $149 per MW as the cost of land based wind power, compared to $79 for combined cycle natural gas for generation coming on line in 2016.   See the following link for the complete report:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/archive/aeo10/electricity_generation.html

Given that mountain top wind power is significantly more expensive to construct than wind power on flat terrain due to the cost of road building to the tops of the mountains, one can safely assume that wind power on Maine’s mountain tops will be comparatively more expensive than wind power in more accessible terrain such as the plains of West Texas, or the cornfields of Iowa or New York, so the estimate contained in the EIA report should be considered conservative for Maine.   

In my brief remarks I also mentioned the fact that the 2007-2008 Governor's Task Force on Wind Power did not analyze the cumulative impact of 2700 MW of grid-scale wind power.  At a 25% capacity factor, which might be conservatively projected in Maine's mountains, 2700 MW will produce only 675 MW on average.  With 33,000 MW of existing generation capacity, the ISO-NE grid operates at a average day time demand of about 17,000 MW.  675 MW is less than 4% of this demand, so even if wind power could offset fossil fuel generation on a 1 to 1 basis as claimed by wind power proponents (no studies of actual grid performance confirm this), the contribution of Maine’s wind power goal, if achieved, will be inconsequential in terms of fossil fuel reductions and any associated environmental benefits.  

Wind power is essentially a symbolic gesture if fossil fuel reduction is the goal.   Even the wind industry recognizes now that "getting off of foreign oil" is a bogus argument since it has become well understood that oil is used  for home heating and transportation, not electricity production.  Today the rallying cry is "green jobs" in the new "green economy", but these heavily subsidized jobs come at a high cost to the taxpayer and to the real economy. 

To understand how the grid integrates wind energy it is important to recognize that wind turbines do not provide reliable, controllable electricity to the grid and therefore the grid operator does not contract with wind generators in its day ahead planning, where by law the next day’s anticipated demand must be scheduled to ensure the grid’s primary responsibility – reliability.   Wind power, when available, is perceived by the grid as an uncontrolled supply, essentially suppressing demand and causing the generators that provide balance between supply and demand, known as “regulating reserves” to ramp up and down as their automatic control systems sense the small changes in voltage that occur throughout the day.    The generators which supply regulating reserves are typically smaller generators located throughout the grid.  In Maine, hydro electric plants, rather than natural gas plants, may be the most cost effective providers of regulating reserves, so wind power fluctuations may be regulated with an existing renewable rather than a fossil fuel plant.  To illustrate this fact, consider that the Calpine gas plant in Rumford does not generate much electricity, but is paid $1 million per month by the ISO to provide “non spinning reserve” capacity, meaning that it will come online only when the grid’s normal operation is compromised by weather extremes or equipment problems.  In the first quarter of 2010 this 265 MW plant, considered state of the art when it was built 10 years ago,  only generated electricity for one day.  The same is true of the Cousins Island oil plant.  It only generates at about 10% of its capacity but is paid a fee to provide capacity when needed.  

Wind power will only increase the need for capacity payments because more reserves will be needed to balance the unpredictable and constant fluctuations of wind generation.  Only grid scale electricity storage will solve this problem.  The technology does not exist to allow electricity from intermittent sources such as wind turbines to be cost effectively stored and later released in the ISO-NE grid.    

In addition to ignoring the technical problems of wind generation the Governor’s Task Force also ignored the impact of wind turbines on Maine’s landscape.  Wind developer Robert Gardiner testified to the Task Force that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, as if wind turbines on Maine’s mountains should be viewed as a subjective matter.   Using that logic, would it make any difference if the plan was to install Ferris Wheels, or allow condominium construction or gambling casinos on the mountain tops?  It is ironic that Maine's environmental groups such as NRCM are now criticizing Governor LePage's regulatory reforms as harmful to Maine's "Quality of Place" while these same groups have been instrumental in crafting Maine's expedited process wind law. 

2700 MW of installed capacity requires 1000 to 1800 wind turbines, depending on the nameplate rating.  At the time of the Governor’s Task Force, the only turbines deployed in Maine were GE 1.5 MW. Lately turbines in the 2 to 3 MW range are being proposed.  The larger the turbine the greater the rotor diameter and the more distance is needed between turbines to reduce "rotor wash" or turbulence caused by the vortex of the upwind turbine’s spinning blades.  Regardless of the size of the turbines, approximately 360  miles of mountain ridges will be required to place turbines in single file strings on the spines of Maine's mountains. Largely ignored by the Task Force was the effect of  2700 MW of wind generators on Maine's landscape, its much heralded "quality of place,"  essential wildlife habitat,  bird, raptor and bat mortality, the economic impact on tourism,  hunting and fishing,  guide services, mountain area hospitality industries, etc. 

The most disturbing aspect of Maine’s rush to “windependence” is the serious disruption to citizens’ lives that has already occurred in the first communities where turbines have been placed near homes.  While the wind industry and the former administration have been united in their denial of the harmful effects of wind turbine noise, the cries of citizens, not only in Maine but around the world is becoming impossible to ignore.   It is not only prudent, but morally responsible to fully examine these issues to better understand the true impact of Maine’s wind power goals. 

There were several presentations that I heard earlier, during the Electricity portion of the meeting, that contained misleading information.  Eric Bryant of the Office of the Public Advocate said that after initial reservations his office eventually concluded that the MPRP was a benefit to ratepayers.  What he did not say is that the State's goal of 2700 MW of wind power established by fiat the notion that wind power was a presumed benefit to the people of Maine.  This presumption pre-empted a logical analysis of the MPRP plan.  In fact the MPRP case file refers to that portion of the project that is attributable to Maine's wind goals and places that cost at about $400 million out of the total $1.4 billion cost,  or almost  1/3 of the total cost of the project.  This does not include hundreds of miles of additional transmission projects that will be needed to connect dozens of impractically-sited remote wind farms to the "new and improved" grid.  Whether these additional projects are paid for by the wind developers or by CMP/Iberdrola remains to be seen,  but either way the ratepayers and taxpayers will foot the bill for an electricity source for which the grid has no fossil fuel reduction program, cannot store the electricity from, and cannot control except to curtail it when it causes reliability problems.

Jeremy Payne of the Maine Renewable Energy Association mentioned claimed that $800 million dollars of wind power has been installed in Maine thus far.  He failed to mention that most of this money was provided by the federal government in the form of stimulus grants, "green energy" subsidies, rapid depreciation, and other federal tax mechanisms.   Nor did he mention that the bulk of these, our tax dollars, paid for turbines that were manufactured in foreign countries.  Furthermore, increases in taxable property due to turbine projects have in many cases been eroded by TIF agreements which drastically reduce the amounts that would otherwise be assessed for host-community property taxes.  The economic benefit to Maine from the wind projects installed to date is a small fraction of the $800 million in overall costs for these projects. The cost to ratepayers and taxpayers for the few temporary construction jobs created is many times more than the wages paid by the developers for these jobs.

In summary, members of the Citizens’ Task Force on Wind Power will join you this session to help policymakers understand how meager are the presumed benefits of grid-scale wind development in Maine's mountains, and how negative are the true impacts -- to our economy,  our citizens, and our environment.  We look forward to working with you this session. 

Sincerely,

Steve Thurston co-chair

Citizens’ Task Force on Wind Power

PO Box 345

Oquossoc, ME 04964

864-5423

 

 

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Comment by cynthia wick on October 18, 2011 at 9:01pm
Thank you Steve for the good information. We are fighting the same battle in the Berkshires now. We are up against the same propaganda and are getting organized. Once we show people here what has happened in Maine they are appalled and it helps them get active.
Comment by Terry Tesseo on February 3, 2011 at 2:45pm
Well said We only hope it doesn't fall on deaf ears

 

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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