December 21, 2021
Letters, Maine

Sides are drawn in North Woods debate

Letter to the editor | The Ellsworth American | December 17, 2021 | www.ellsworthamerican.com

Piscataquis, Somerset and Aroostook counties are in danger of becoming the new Clean Energy Connect for solar and wind development. Irrespective of the developments themselves just how many miles of transmission lines, clear cuts, wildlife habitat will be destroyed, but more importantly the entire unique character of the North Maine Woods will be forever altered and lost for future generations.

It is quite one thing to have 15 Canadian sugar sap houses and hundreds of thousands of taps, miles and miles of collection lines on the Golden Road just 10 miles from the border. Let’s now add another swath of destruction and hundreds of miles of transmission lines. So, here we go again with RFPs (request for proposals) to the developers for a legislatively mandated transmission corridor, no different from CMP’s (NECEC) except for the corridors and substations to service multi hundreds of 600-foot windmills and 40,000-panel solar farms in the North Maine Woods.

This is where the political left and right should meet. Now with the apparent defeat of CMP’s high-voltage transmission line are we going to turn round and destroy Maines last great natural asset?

With the recent news of 85 percent increases in the supply side our monthly electrical bills, I’m beginning to wonder if any constituency (governmental, environmental, including the public) has a clue how disastrous these projects would be in comparison to the 145-mile CMP transmission line. Only corrupt politicians, crony capitalists, developers and soulless corporate contractors will line their pockets with the subsidies and tax benefits provided by the rest of us.

The root of all these failures goes back to at least 1998 when the Legislature, at the behest of Governor Angus King, forced the breakup up of our public utilities. The fix was in because the insiders of CMP and Bangor Hydro got rich when FPL, now Nextera, got CMP’s dams and Emera, now Versant (city of Calgary, Alberta) along with Brookfield, Canada, own Bangor Hydro’s dams.

Maine voters and ratepayers need to smarten up and pay attention to what has been done to them in the name of good governance.

Maybe we are headed for the trash heap of Democratic experiments, but for me I will keep speaking in defense of the republic until we turn it around or fail.

Dudley Gray
Rangeley Plantation


URL to article:  https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2021/12/21/sides-are-drawn-in-north-woods-debate/