Canada, not wind, is energy solution

“What we love about Maine – trees, lakes, mountains, our history – is also our chief economic advantage. Investing in new ways in our traditional industries – such as tourism – will reap greater economic rewards. Maine’s quality of place is important to our future. . . (this) is Maine’s calling card to the world.”

So sayeth Gov. John Baldacci as he travels the world, echoing the Brookings Institution’s recommendations on what Maine must do to be successful in the global economy. Their report, “Charting Maine’s Future: An Action Plan for Promoting Sustainable Prosperity and Quality Places,” states that Maine’s best strategy, if not its only hope, is to capitalize on our natural environment and small, human-scale towns and villages that contribute to a superb quality of life – prime assets in an increasingly industrialized, crowded and indifferent world.

After years of our begging the state to do something to bring clean industry and quality permanent jobs to the area, along with a highway, the governor has instead gone ahead and lowered environmental standards while using his bully pulpit to push an industry – wind power – that will irreversibly degrade the same “quality of place.”

Through federal subsidies and “double accelerated depreciation,” we all pay for behemoth wind farms. As ratepayers of ISO New England, we will also pay for the needed transmission lines to southern New England. “Carbon credits” will be sold to polluters, enabling them to keep polluting. The electricity will be sold at a premium to the Boston-New York corridor. The profits of the venture will leave the state and the country, in the case of Portuguese-owned Horizon Wind Energy. The resultant loss of views, noise pollution, light pollution and loss of recreational access to mountain ridgelines will remain right here, along with several hundred 350- to 490-foot tall wind turbines, forever.

One can predict contraction of the local colleges and hospitals as nature loving students and highly trained “people from away” decline to relocate to Aroostook County.

Maine already exports electricity to southern New England while we pay the third highest rates in the continental United States. If the governor was serious about helping Mainers and reducing Maine’s “carbon footprint,” we could quit ISO New England and formally and administratively hook up to the Canadian electrical grid where surplus, mostly hydro-generated electricity costs at least 50 percent less. Maine would save hundreds of millions of dollars a year, much of which currently leaves the state to Pennsylvania-based Energy East, the owner of Central Maine Power.

Heating homes with electricity makes sense at those rates, as it currently does in Quebec, where my mother pays 6 cents per kilowatt-hour – while we pay 16.5 cents! That would reduce living costs, and our carbon footprint, as heating oil approaches $5 per gallon, threatening to freeze lower income Mainers and forcing many to consider leaving the state for warmer climates.

By virtue of having cheap Canadian energy available, we may be able to retain our people and attract the clean, value-added industry and jobs the state needs.

While there may be a small place for wind power in our nation’s energy future, it is not here, in the townships of the St. John River Valley. The U.S. Department of Energy’s own maps show wind in Aroostook as “poor” to “fair” whereas coastal Maine’s wind is “good” to “superb.” What is driving the governor to push wind power upon small rural communities in northernmost Maine?

Can it be that he prefers to impose the environmental negatives of industrial wind power on, as they see it, the unempowered, economically disadvantaged residents of that portion of Maine left off tourist maps, while preserving “Quality of Place” for the residents of coastal Maine – where the votes are – as the governor gets a feather in his cap as “Mr. Wind Energy”?

Or does he believe we have so few prospects that the only lifesaver he can toss us comes at the expense of our major asset, our environment – and, if we believe the Brookings Institution and the governor’s own interpretation of their report, our future?

The governor’s energy policies look like a slow motion train wreck for the St. John Valley, and, through the governor’s neglect of the potential of clean, renewable Canadian electricity right on our doorstep, the entire state.

Michael A. Nissenbaum is a radiologist at Northern Maine Medical Center in Fort Kent.