More Closed Mills, Higher Energy costs and failed Energy Policy To Take a Serious Economic Toll in NE

Mainer's Are About to pay dearly for their legislated  "Greenwashed" Renewable  Wind Power policy.   Industrial Wind, a feckless scam in Maine ,is adding to the pain. Industrial wind expansion in Maine must end , and dense fuel expansion such as natural gas must be placed online rapidly , or Maine's economy will get worse , much worse.

See below please, and hang onto your pocketbooks this winter.

Sept. 30, 2015 

Natural gas is so abundant and cheap in much of the U.S. that producers want to export it overseas. Except in New England, where gas is so hard to get that companies are importing it from as far away as Yemen.

The U.S. shale boom that has produced a glut of gas—and helped lower many Americans’ home heating bills—has largely bypassed the energy-starved New England. Few pipelines are available to ferry gas from Pennsylvania and Ohio to Connecticut and Maine, and new lines proposed in the region won’t go into service until 2018, or later.

Gas plants currently supply 44% of New England’s electricity, up from just 18% in 2000. Consumers and businesses are also swapping their old furnaces that burn heating oil for newer models that run on gas.

So as the weather cools, problems loom.

When brutal cold hits this winter, energy prices will soar. In Massachusetts, the residential gas price was $14 per thousand cubic feet last January, more than 50% above the national average, according to the U.S. Energy Department. At nearly 21 cents a kilowatt-hour, average first-quarter home electricity prices in New England were two-thirds higher than the U.S. average, federal data show.

ENLARGE

The coming winter in New England is expected to be colder and snowier than normal, similar to what the region has experienced the previous few years, said Michael Schlacter, a meteorologist with private forecaster Weather 2000.

As a result, power plant operators are likely to increase the amount of liquefied natural gas they import from faraway suppliers in Trinidad and Tobago and the Middle East. Imported gas can cost two to three times as much as the gas that was pumped in the U.S.

John Flynn, a senior vice president at U.K.-based utility National Grid PLC, which serves parts of New England, said gas and power prices in the region will keep rising until new gas pipelines get built to bring cheap supplies to the region.

“We simply can’t keep up with the desire by customers to switch from oil to gas, because of a lack of pipeline capacity,” he said.

Most of the gas pipelines under consideration are hotly contested by some communities that object to fossil-fuel development or don’t want the lines buried under their towns.

Federal regulators said in August they would allow more time to consider public concerns about a pipeline that Kinder Morgan Inc. is planning to build, which would be capable of carrying up to 2 billion cubic feet of gas a day from Pe... starting in November 2018.

National Grid, based in Waltham, Mass., is developing a $3 billion pipeline with Spectra Energy Corp. and Eversource Energy that aims to bring 1 billion cubic feet of gas every day to New England starting in 2018. The companies haven’t yet requested federal approval for that project. A different Spectra pipeline project in Massachusetts has faced opposition from some Boston officials and residents.

New England’s lack of easy access to natural gas is forcing many power-plant operators to burn dirty fuel oil and coal instead, which ends up causing more pollution. The region’s overall emissions of nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide have dropped since 2001, but those pollutants increased sharply from December 2013 to March 2014, according to the region’s power grid operator.

The American energy boom has been so successful that last year producers pulled 26% more gas out of the ground in places like Texas and Pennsylvania than five years earlier, according to federal data. So much gas is available in some regions that exports to foreign buyers are on the rise.

U.S. gas shipped across the border on pipelines to Mexico has doubled in the last five years. Starting this winter, the first significant volumes of liquefied natural gas will ship out from a plant on the Gulf Coast near the Louisiana border, and several more export terminals are under construction.

Write to Cassandra Sweet at cassandra.sweet@wsj.com

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

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(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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