WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS

An optimistic report on wind power by the Public Utilities Commission addresses potential sites for placing turbines. It observes that while mountain ridges traditionally have been seen as optimal places for wind-power development, large areas of flat ground – blueberry or potato fields – “are also considered by some as viable candidates for wind facilities.”

But what Maine has learned in the rejection by the Land Use Regulation Commission of the Redington Wind site is that talking about optimal placement and the performance benefits of one topography vs. another is largely meaningless.

The state not long ago created The Maine Wind Energy Act to “take every reasonable action to encourage the attraction of appropriately sited wind-energy-related development.” Before that, it created the Maine Climate Change Act to respond to the threats to the state’s flora, fauna and overall health. These acts, under the LURC decision last week, turn out to mean the state will site wind power with the same enthusiasm it would site a coal-fired plant: as the undesirable tradeoff for the endlessly desirable turning on of lights, televisions, air conditioning, computers, clocks, washers and dryers, coffee pots, hair dryers, stoves, dishwashers, toasters, refrigerators, and on and on.

Under the rejection of the 30-tower proposal, “appropriately sited” wind turbines would mar no one’s bucolic view with the reminder of the cost of all that is waiting at home to ease life along.

It’s true that power generation doesn’t belong just anywhere and people really do need places where the view is uninterrupted by the cost of their necessities and pleasures. But any theory about wind power displacing a measurable amount of fossil-fuel power here depends on the placement of hundreds of these turbines in Maine. The Conservation Law Foundation argues the locations at Redington and Black Nubble mountains represented “one of the relatively few suitable sites for commercial-scale wind power in the state.”

CLF calculates that New England needs about 8,000 megawatts of wind power to meet regional climate-change goals that Maine agreed to. The Redington site would produce 90 MW; Mars Hill could produce 54. Maine has the greatest wind potential of any state in the region – but potential doesn’t turn on the lights.

The LURC decision could set a precedent that would preclude from development other sites of scenic or ecological value while avoiding the underlying reason for the need to site wind turbines – the ecological threat of climate change.

The nation, Maine included, has powered itself into a polluted corner, and the question is whether, for a relatively brief time, it can endure the use of these low-polluting but unsightly structures while it searches for better energy choices. The structures will by necessity be proposed for scenic areas because dramatically high places are coincidentally scenic and windy. (The same might be said for dramatically fast flowing rivers and tidal areas. Humans are drawn to places of natural drama, setting up endless battles between the appreciation of nature and its utility.)

The unintentional but inescapable answer from LURC was stick with oil or gas or coal before upsetting the landscape. It is choices such as these, made for entirely understandable reasons, that push the state and the nation ever further into that polluted corner. There is no pleasant way out.