Where will the wind farms go?

The first time I drove through Southern California, I was struck by the unique beauty of the beaches. Then I drove by a cluster of oil wells! Oil wells? Yes, right on the beach?

I think of those machines moving up and down slowly, like a drinking duck, as they pumped out the last bits of oil from under those beautiful beaches every time I read another aesthetic objection to wind farms.

We expect California to put ugly metal derricks on its beaches. We do not object when huge drilling platforms are floated out into the gulf off Louisiana. We tear down whole mountains to mine coal for electricity. But when someone wants to put a silent, sleek wind tower anywhere near us, we say “Oh, no, not here. Our place is special –unlike any other. Windmills will ruin the unique view!”

Recently, Maine was the scene of a particularly bizarre example of this sort of thinking.
A company called “Maine Mountain Power” proposed a 30-unit wind farm in the northern woods of Maine. The wind farm could provide enough electricity for 40,000 homes and replace 730,000 pounds of pollution per day generated by a conventional fossil fuel plant. It would be built near Reddington, on old logging roads, in a relatively unpopulated area of Maine.

Some of the towers would be visible from the Appalachian Trail and others from the Sugarloaf Ski report, but mockup photographs show that they would appear small and distant.

Approval of the project was put into the hands of the Maine Land Use Regulation Commission (LURC) and on December 22nd, 2006, Maine papers reported that the LURC staff had recommended “…approval of a proposed wind farm project for Reddington Pond Range and Black Nubble Mountains near the Sugarloaf ski resort.”

“The staff’s analysis noted that the LURC had received more than 200 letters in support of the project, as well as support from former Maine Governor Angus King and several legislators, the president of Sugarloaf Ski Resort, and the Franklin Journal, Kennebec Journal, Lewiston Sun Journal, and Portland Press Herald.“

Sounds like a “win-win” right? Nope. At the end of January the board of the LURC, which supervises ten million acres of largely uninhabited “unorganized land,” rejected its staff’s recommendations and vetoed the Reddington project citing “concerns about its visual and environmental effects.”

If we cannot put wind farms where they will never be seen by 99.99% of all Americans; if we cannot put them in a small part of ten million acres of woods; if we cannot have them on land that had previously been cleared by loggers, then where can we put them? And if we don’t start building them right now, might it not be too late to save the planet for our grandkids?

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