Wind wars | Kind to the environment and clean as a whistle, it just may be the state's best bet for energy independence. So why can't wind power work in western Maine?

Surprise was audible when the Land Use Regulation Commission voted Jan. 24 to deny permits for the Redington Pond/Black Nubble wind farm near the Sugarloaf/USA ski resort, which would have produced 100 megawatts of electricity.

Steve Wight, who's served on LURC for 20 years and served for a decade as chairman, knew that his fellow commissioners had doubts about the project, but he had no idea that he'd be the only vote in favor on the seven-member panel. "They had made their case," he said recently of the developers. "The staff recommended approval, and the state agencies had signed off."

Harley Lee, president of Endless Energy of Yarmouth, who had pursued the Redington project indefatigably for 17 years, said he was "frankly, shocked," and five months later still sounds rueful.

Lee said he believes the environmental groups opposed to Endless Energy's application — groups like Maine Audubon, the Natural Resources Council of Maine, and the Appalachian Mountain Club, joined by the National Park Service — stuck to an agenda even after facts stood in the way. "They didn't like the way the science came out," he said. "And surveys showed that even 90% of the hikers favored wind power."

Naturally, the groups in question vigorously disagree with this characterization. Jody Jones, Maine Audubon's wildlife biologist, said Redington is excellent habitat for two key endangered species, Bicknell's thrush and the northern bog lemming. These creatures, and the ecological community they represent, are present in only a handful of Maine sites — all of them remote, high-mountain areas. The resource that would be harmed by tower construction, she said, is irreplaceable.

Yet the biggest factor in LURC's rejection, Wight believes, was the Appalachian Trail and the "iconic" status it now enjoys among those who love the outdoors. The trail passes within a mile of the Redington site, and 20 400-foot wind towers and turbine blades would have been clearly visible from the trail. He doesn't think critics tried to precisely quantify the impacts, but in the end it caused them to overlook the project's many virtues. "People may think there will be wind turbines sprouting out of every mountain," Harley Lee said. "It's just not so. Between the orientation of the ridge, the distance to power lines, and the location within LURC jurisdiction, at least 80% of ridges are ruled out right off."

The remaining sites, he said, may face serious opposition, just as Redington/Black Nubble did. Reconsideration of the Black Nubble site in September, bracketed by hearings on major projects in Oxford and Washington counties the month before and after, will do much to determine the immediate future of wind power in Maine. LURC's comprehensive plan, noted Lee, suggests development be allowed only on the fringes of the Unorganized Territory, near existing development. With ski resort Sugarloaf/USA nearby and organized townships to the south, this site should have qualified, he said.

In the wake of the LURC vote, the question naturally arose of whether Maine, like Vermont and Massachusetts before it, was going to throw up roadblock after roadblock to wind power projects. An off-shore Cape Cod wind farm has become a long-running cause célèbre and symbol of boutique environmentalism, opposed by everyone from the politically ambitious Republican Gov. Mitt Romney to the Kennedy family, which has yachted in the area for generations. In Vermont, all the commercial-grade proposals have been rejected by regulators or tied up in courts.

The answer to the question of whether there are roadblocks to wind power in Maine, however, appears to be a conditional "no." New England's first sizeable wind farm began operations on Mars Hill in March, and two other large projects, on Kibby Mountain on the New Hampshire border, and Stetson Mountain in Washington County, are moving ahead.

Despite earlier rejecting the idea of a "half project" only on Black Nubble, Endless Energy and its bigfoot partner, Edison Mission Group of California, has decided to do just that, with a new LURC hearing scheduled in September. The new project is just about half the size of the previous one, producing 52 megawatts from 18 turbines with a construction cost of $80-$90 million.

If all four current projects are built, Maine would have an installed capacity of nearly 300 megawatts of wind energy, producing enough electricity to power more than 100,000 homes. That would put the state ahead of NRCM's goal of seeing more than five percent of its electricity needs met by wind in 2010, and on track to meet a 10% goal by 2020, said NRCM's Advocacy Director Pete Didisheim. "This is a major indigenous resource," he said. "It's our best current shot to move toward being self-sufficient in energy."

Spin cycle
NRCM could end up being the swing group if LURC's commissioners indeed change their mind and supply the three additional votes, besides Wight's, necessary for approval of Black Nubble.

NRCM has been pushing the idea of construction on the second ridge, a westerly offshoot of Redington, and, unexpectedly, its idea was vindicated by the developers. Didisheim, who, along with Jody Jones, was named in late June to the Governor's Task Force on Wind Power Development in Maine, said the two ridges have important differences. Black Nubble is lower by 300 feet, is three miles from the AT rather than one, and has "significantly fragmented" habitat from "fairly intensive logging" in recent years.

Audubon and AMC, however, remain opposed. To Jody Jones, the same species likely to be present on Redington are equally likely on Black Nubble. The ridge is nearly continuous, she said, and the effect of heavy construction of towers in the back woods is no different.

Kenneth Kimball, staff scientist for AMC, agreed that the site isn't as ideal as some think. "There isn't much of this high-altitude habitat left," he said. "This site has more conflicts than just about any other in Maine." He notes that Redington/Black Nubble is the only wind power project AMC has ever opposed.

Lee admits that the decision to pursue Black Nubble alone wasn't an easy one. "The costs are greater per unit, and the benefits are less, too," he said. "If we had the project up and running, we'd be eliminating 800,000 pounds of pollutants per day. Now, we'll be eliminating only 400,000."

Since Redington would be put in a permanent conservation easement under Endless Energy's current plan to develop Black Nubble, it will eliminate Redington from ever being used as a wind power site.

It's clear that the decision to move ahead wasn't made lightly. Endless Energy's partner, Edison Mission Group, a subsidiary of giant Edison International, is the nation's fifth largest wind energy producer. Based in California, it operates 14 projects in five states, with seven in Minnesota alone. Along with major projects in Iowa and New Mexico, its turbines pump out a combined 600 megawatts in all. Its Wildarado Wind Ranch in the Texas panhandle, just up and running this spring, has 70 turbines producing 130 megawatts — and it faced a lot fewer regulatory obstacles.

Wind power on a commercial scale is too new to New England to assess profitability, but the Maine sites have attracted serious capital. UPC Wind raised $44 million for its Mars Hill project in March from JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Edison Mission Group, Endless Energy's partner, does not report profits separately from its parent company, Edison International, but the corporation's stock price was up 37% during the 12 months through late June. And Vestas, the giant Danish turbine making that will likely supply components for Maine projects, saw its turbine sales grow 7.5% last year.

Windy hills
With all the conflict over Maine's high mountains, one might wonder whether other sites would be more buildable. Christian Herter, a hydro developer who also partnered with an ill-fated wind project on the Boundary Mountains, created a lot of excitement last year when he tested the wind in northern Aroostook County potato fields. But Herter has not released data, and Harley Lee, for one, is skeptical he'll find a winning site.

"The winds are strongest and most consistent over the ridges," he said. "That's where you have to look for large, commercially viable sites." He acknowledges that "the wind gets stronger when you get off-shore," but said, "There aren't sites as shallow as Cape Cod in Maine." And because it's such a magnet for controversy, many doubt that the Cape project will go ahead any time soon.

So if mountains are the place, Maine still has attractive prospects. Since the LURC vote on Redington, there has been a groundswell of support for the Kibby Mountain site that TransCanada, based in Alberta, put before the commission in January.

Steve Wight believes that Lee took a lot of the flak that might have been directed at other projects, like Kibby. "Harley was the pioneer," he said. "He walked in and had no idea what he was getting into. The other developers were there, taking copious notes. He showed them where not to go, and what not to do. He paid their tuition."

In addition to TransCanada's plans for Kibby Mountain, UPC Wind, based in Newton, Mass., is hoping to repeat its Mars Hill success with another major wind farm on Stetson Mountain, in Washington County.

Though Wight didn't see eye to eye with the other LURC members on the Redington/Black Nubble decision, he's quick to defend the commission. "It was really a lot to put on our plate, to develop policy for the whole state," said Wight, who also owns the Sunday River Inn in Newry. "We didn't have a whole lot of help." He supports the idea of a governor's task force, currently being formed, to examine siting issues and conflicting uses, but wishes it had happened earlier.

Kibby, the highest peak along the Boundary Mountains, was the site of an ill-fated application by Kenetech, a high-flying wind company that crashed shortly after its LURC application was approved in 1990, along with a settlement agreement with the same environmental groups recently active in the Redington debate. Under terms of a new agreement with TransCanada, there will be substantial mitigation, including $500,000 to purchase conservation rights on nearby mountain slopes.

There is only one intervenor in opposition to the Kibby plan, a group called Friends of the Boundary Mountains, which also was active during the Kenetech debate. In a March 7 piece in the Kingfield Original Irregular, veteran activist Robert Kimber gives the flavor of their argument: "If Maine's wild lands are to be preserved for their traditional uses of timberland management and remote, backcountry recreation, we have to resist every attempt to convert them to industrial use." Kimber says of mountain sites that "their benefit in combating global warming is small; their costs to Maine in loss of its mountain resources are high."

It's difficult to find anyone willing to predict LURC votes, but it seems likely that Kibby has a better shot than the original Redington/Black Nubble project, or even Black Nubble alone.

There are no intervenors in the Stetson Mountain application, though there has been some local concern about the location of transmission lines.

Which way the wind blows
Still, it would be a mistake to think that there are no impacts for any wind power site.

In Mars Hill, the startup of turbines close to residential areas produced a lot more noise than some residents were expecting. One nearby family told the Bangor Daily News that the "phfoop, phfoop, phfoop" noise kept them awake at night, leading to the shutdown of the nearest turbine. LURC, which acts as planning board for the Unorganized Territory, pledged to pay closer attention to noise issues in the future (the Mars Hill site, in an organized municipality, was approved by DEP), although none of its current applications are within half a mile of residences. (In a June 21 press release from the Newton, Mass.-based UPC Wind, Chief Operating Officer Michael Alvarez said that "sound levels [at the Mars Hill site] are consistent with the estimates contained in our permit application.")

And though the proposal to develop a wind farm on Stetson Mountain in Washington County has gone largely unnoticed compared to the controversy in western Maine, there's no guarantee that there won't be any local — or even statewide — opposition. "The turbines [at Stetson] would be clearly visible from Baskahegan Lake, and that's a largely undeveloped, beautiful piece of water," said NRCM's Pete Didisheim.

There's little doubt that wind power has raised passions about energy production nearly equal to those that in an earlier generation were focused on nuclear power plants, especially Maine Yankee. Activists launched no fewer than three unsuccessful attempts to shut down Maine's only nuclear plant by referendum, the last in 1987. Ironically, the plant was closed by its utility owners in 1998 in the face of expensive repairs to the cooling system.

Wind, however, has split environmentalists into supporters and opponents. While some hate what 400-foot turbines would do to a pastoral mountain view or fear that the turbines will impact fragile ecosystems, others praise wind power because it uses no fossil fuel, produces no heat, and represents a viable alternative to the coal and oil plants that waft tons of earth-warming pollution from the Midwest to Maine.

Pete Didisheim said testimony before LURC gave dramatic evidence of how wind power cuts both ways with people. "Some hikers who use the AT said it would give them a sense of hope to come over a ridge and see wind turbines on the next mountain top. Others said it would destroy the experience they'd come to have."

Didisheim is bullish, in a measured way, about the future of wind power in Maine — as long as it's not on the Redington Pond Ridge. "We want this to succeed not only in Maine, but in New England — as an example for Vermont, and Massachusetts too," he said. "Once again, Maine can be a leader. It's up to us to make this work."

Harley Lee says he will continue to pursue his dream of creating substantial wind power in Maine, despite all the numerous disappointments two decades have brought. Asked when, if LURC approves Black Nubble in September, construction could start, he said wistfully, "The turbines we thought we were installing are coming across the Atlantic now," after being manufactured in Denmark, said Lee. "We don't know where they'll go now. There's a lot of demand for turbines, and Edison Mission has a lot of projects."

Nationally, the wind industry has been set back by inconsistent policy, with tax credits offered than expired, only to get back on the books again. "One year there's a billion dollars worth of business, the next year zero," Lee said. "It's hard to develop a market under those conditions."

This is frustrating to Lee, because "modern wind power started in New England," with a generator on Crotched Mountain in New Hampshire, installed in 1980. Now, he sees a rising market again, with domestic manufacturers growing up in California, and possibly elsewhere.

Surely there must be easier ways to get ahead than developing wind power, Lee is asked. Is he a man obsessed, or simply one who's persistent?

He laughed, and then said, "I suppose it's a little of both."