July 11, 2011
Letters, Maine

Wind power backers only aim at despoiling wild sites

The Portland Press Herald, www.pressherald.com 10 July 2011

Thank you, Angus King, for another smarmy article on why mountaintop wind power should be wholeheartedly embraced by the people of Maine (“Energy choices and the No Free Lunch principle,” June 5).

You get to walk away with millions in the form of taxpayer-guaranteed income, while my family gets to bear the burden of your greed.

We have been property owners for 70 years at Ellis Pond in Roxbury, Maine, where your company Record Hill Wind LLC is in the process of ruining the lake and surrounding mountains to produce minuscule, intermittent, unreliable and grossly expensive electricity.

Property owners like myself, who own family camps in the western Maine mountains that have been passed down for generations, treasure these places precisely because they don’t have what you are constructing: huge out-of-place towers festooned with strobe lights that will blot out what was once the beautiful night sky.

If wind power is so worthwhile, why are wind farms not built in more populated areas where electricity use is greatest and the electrical grid easier to tap into? How about off-shore islands in Casco Bay, off Camp Ellis and Old Orchard, Fort Gorges and Brunswick?

None are proposed for these areas because such inefficient eyesores would not be tolerated. Poor rural communities are targeted and ripe for this kind of development, with many property-owning taxpayers disenfranchised by not being primary residents and thus having no vote.

Rapacious wind power developers are like having a neighbor who throws his trash on your property and lets you deal with the consequences.

Wind power features small amounts of electricity, environmentally destructive to construct turbines that are built in foreign countries, that are only feasible with federal government loan guarantees, even as the government sinks deeper in debt.

That spells boondoggle to me.

Stephen Griffin

Gray

URL to article:  https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2011/07/11/wind-power-backers-only-aim-at-despoiling-wild-sites/