What is the benefit?

To the editor:
    I believe wind power is environmentally responsible. However, if one is in favor of more commercial wind farms in Aroostook County, ask yourself what is the benefit to the County and its people? There is likely to be no benefit, and certain to be many costs.
    Certain costs include the change of scenery for us, our neighbors and tourists. Maine Public Service and Central Maine Power have joined forces to create a new venture called Maine Power Connection (MPC) which would allow all the wind energy from wind farms to be exported to southern New England. The MPC is 200-plus miles of 75-foot and higher H-style tower structures, 345,000 volt power lines that we will all finance in the “electricity delivery” portion of our electric bills. This is expected to cost us $625 million. The transmission line is at the behest of wind developers such as Aroostook Wind, Horizon and First Wind who are all interested in developing more wind farms in this part of the state.
    The wind developers are big ventures with no benefit to Aroostook County. They want to put windmills here because we have some resources and infrastructure. They will use our roads and cement factories and gravel pits. They will also ask us to spend $625 million so they have a way to turn our wind resource into money for them – not for us. I propose we tax the wind resource when not for community or personal use at 1 cent per kw hour and that wind developers pay for their own MPC. We don’t need MPC, but they do. We don’t make billions off a half billion dollar investment in turbines, but they do. Let them extend their 4- to 6-year payback to 8 to 10 years. Let the wind developers buy the MPC.
    Think about resources — we usually expect to be paid for our forest, farm and ocean products leaving. Let all future commercial wind farms be subject to a 1 cent kw hour tax to benefit Aroostook County and the state of Maine. This would give us a benefit from the change in scenery with the over 200 miles of high power lines, along with hundreds more wind turbines.
    Do not be fooled by the marketing terms like a half billion dollars invested in Aroostook — 99 percent of this money goes overseas to the factories that make turbines and towers. Only gravel, cement, motels and food benefit Aroostook – which is indeed a benefit but the deception is a hundred-fold more.
    Landowners think they will profit from wind tower lease sites, but often tower reclamation becomes the landowner’s problem, tax increases offset lease payments and final tower sites are determined after a landowner signs on. There are so many things we don’t know that we are supposed to ask before we sign a lease but the court sees our ignorance as tough luck for us.
    I am a proponent of wind power as I believe it is environmentally responsible but let us be compensated for living in a changed Aroostook through a resource tax and let us not finance the MPC for transmission lines the wind developers need.
Ryan Hines
Hammond