Opportunity, again

It’s a rare thing when opportunity snubbed makes a return visit. It’s rarer still for it to pound on the door with both fists.

The snub in question occurred some three years ago, when the Maritimes & Northeast natural gas pipeline was being laid across Maine, linking the huge gas field off the coast of Nova Scotia with markets to the south. Washington County got more miles of this pipeline than anywhere else in the state, yet it got no gas.

The King administration declined to negotiate this point with the company – a couple of taps, say, at Calais and above Machias in exchange for the use of the countryside – observing that the region lacked the large industrial users needed to make the taps cost-effective, yet failing to note that the very existence of the taps could have helped to attract large industrial users.

Several such users were in sight at the time, in the form of gas-fired power plants, but no effort was made to entice one to Washington County, as the region lacked transmission lines of sufficient capacity and the administration lacked the initiative to pursue them. For Washington County, inured as it is to the attitude that economic development is something that occurs somewhere else, the entire episode was not so much disappointing as it was banal.

The new opportunity comes calling in the form of two projects that will vastly increase the capacity of transmission lines through and near Maine. The proposed Bangor Hydro/New Brunswick Power line will run, as does the pipeline, across the entire width of Washington County. The Neptune Project, a network of undersea lines, will connect power plants in the Maritimes and Maine to consumers in Boston, New York and beyond.

Though neither project is expressly, or even peripherally, intended to foster economic development in Washington County, Charles Hewitt, CEO of Atlantic Energy Partners, the consortium behind Neptune, says the possibility is very much there. Access to both natural gas and to high-capacity transmission lines is a combination with great potential value.

It would be entirely feasible, Mr. Hewitt says, for gas-fired power plants in Washington County to connect to the Neptune system via a trunk line to a hub to be built in New Brunswick. Or, they could tie into the Bangor Hydro/NB Power line and a trunk could be built from that line’s terminus at Orrington to a planned Neptune hub at the former Maine Yankee plant in Wiscasset that will deliver electricity to Connecticut.

The immediate need in the Eastern United States’ electric system is increased transmission capacity; it is that need that these two projects address. A need-in-waiting is increased generation and Mr. Hewitt believes Maine could be a significant player. Although distance equals money in the power game, the power loss and wheeling charges could be more than offset by the vastly lower cost of building power plants in rural Maine as compared to heavily developed urban areas.

Mr. Hewitt also cites an important environmental aspect. New gas-fired power plants are much cleaner than old plants that burn coal, oil or diesel, and the more gas is used, the less the others are needed. Since a major cause of Maine’s air-quality problems is the emissions that travel here on prevailing winds from those old plants, it is possible that Maine could produce more power and have cleaner air at the same time. Further, the electricity running through the Neptune system will be direct current, eliminating the safety and health concerns associated with alternating current.

All this is intriguing and has the potential to be of great benefit to a part of that state in dire need, but it requires the administration to begin working with these two projects now, in the early stages of planning. It requires a concerted effort by all relevant agencies of state government to solve problems rather than surrendering to them. It will very likely require actual financial investment by the state in Washington County. First, though, it requires answering the door.