The Great Maine Windmill Scam... 2004-?

  • Active since 1995, Hearth.com is THE place on the internet for free information and advice about wood stoves, pellet stoves and other energy saving equipment.

    We strive to provide opinions, articles, discussions and history related to Hearth Products and in a more general sense, energy issues.

    We promote the EFFICIENT, RESPONSIBLE, CLEAN and SAFE use of all fuels, whether renewable or fossil.
  • Super Cedar firestarters 30% discount Use code Hearth2024 Click here
Status
Not open for further replies.
Wildo

Wildo

Minister of Fire
Dec 14, 2011
555
jackmanistan, maine
It now causes power outages too!... at my house anyway.;lol(broken link removed to http://wabi.tv/2016/05/16/truck-carrying-wind-mill-tower-topples-over-near-the-forks/)
(broken link removed to http://wabi.tv/2016/05/16/truck-carrying-wind-mill-tower-topples-over-near-the-forks/)

More destruction of our beautiful areas in the name of $GREEN$ energy....for Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island .:(

http://bangordailynews.com/2016/02/01/business/cmp-emera-proposal-would-double-maine-wind-power/


I am all for responsible renewable energy but we are getting ***** up here one scenic view at a time. Put them out in the ocean where nobody has to see the 300-400 foot tall ugly noisy things.

http://energy.gov/articles/maine-project-launches-first-grid-connected-offshore-wind-turbine-us

The future of energy is tidal and offshore wind provided by the oceans and nobody has to have a giant rusty eyesore in there backyard when the company goes bankrupt every couple years and they break down.

http://bangordailynews.com/2013/04/...-million-turbine-at-maines-largest-wind-farm/

When the thing breaks down it can be sunk and turned into an artificial reef.

http://bangordailynews.com/2015/01/...finalizes-2-4-billion-purchase-of-first-wind/

15 months later... BANKRUPTCY...

http://bangordailynews.com/2016/04/21/business/sunedison-files-for-chapter-11-bankruptcy-protection/

but wait there's more...

http://www.wnd.com/2016/05/sunedison-bankruptcy-exposes-climate-change-corruption/

I am so sick of crooks,politicians, and the scams funded by tax payers to pull the rug out from under our own feet while preaching about how it is for the greater good.

Driving by this today obviously struck a nerve. Everyone should wake up, and speak up before they build these in your backyard too.

Watch the documentary WINDFALL. It is informative.

Sorry about the novella.::P
 
  • Like
Reactions: BoilerMan and beatlefan
A reference cited in the one of the articles http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/fullaccidents.pdf
Interesting read. Blade breakage, chunks of ice being thrown from the windmills (mostly noted in Germany) would be a further cause of concern for the general public beyond fire ... Health effects from noise and stray voltage.

Did read an article on bird/bat strikes and makes me wonder on the health effects attributed to noise. That article mentioned it was air pressure changes from the blades that killed bats (sensitive lungs apparently).

http://www.windaction.org/posts/36082-grey-highlands-2012-wind-turbine-noise-survey#.Vzs2OvkrLIU
Study in Ontario on noise by civil & environmental engineering professor emeritus from University of Waterloo Download: file:///C:/Users/Acer/Downloads/grey_highlands_plateau_noise_20130131%20(1).pdf
 
Last edited:
Repealing Citizen's United and getting the money out of politics starting with the elections and prohibiting revolving door positions would be a good first step. There is so much cronyism in all levels that are really criminal activities going unpunished.
 
  • Like
Reactions: vinny11950 and Wildo
While it is good First Nations are becoming more proactive in energy supply, ownership of FN so far away should not be allowed to do this to a municipality that held a referendum for no wind farms:
http://www.lfpress.com/2016/04/12/native-wind-farm-ok-stirs-up-hot-air-locally
They should have some empathy for lack of local control based on FN history...

Many of these FN communities have been generating their own electricity with diesel generators until recently ... locally they are installing solar & wind generation which is good to see. FN ownership of 10% of the company gives the go-ahead advantage for the windfarm bidding .... doesn't even have to be local to the region.
 
Last edited:
(broken link removed)
Most of the projects seem to have connections with local communities and first nations which is a bonus ... also enjoy affected community support. The only really contentious one seems to be the Strong Breeze Wind Project...
 
The ice wind throw issue is point of contention in the outdoors community. Different owners have different policies on how close the public can get. There is speculation that the owners use a liberal ice throw exclusion area year round to keep the public out so they wont find the inevitably bird kills associated with the towers.

Thank the current governor for gutting the authority of the LURC a few years back to make it lot easier to site turbines in the unorganized territories.
 
Despite the hype, VATs have never been competitive with conventional turbines. Unfortunately you cant cheat physics which favors a conventional design. In the press VATs down low near the ground or attached to a building roof are quite popular but the reality is that the wind down near the ground or near a building is turbulent and much of the energy in the wind is wasted. VATs down near the ground should be regarded as moving kinetic sculptures rather than as a generator. It comes down to a conventional turbine blade is always producing power through 360 degrees of rotation while a VAT blade only produces power through 180 degrees of rotation, when it is on the return running opposite to the wind the blade is not producing power.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: woodgeek
It is gonna be removed tomorrow. The word on the street is that it will be a $1,000,000+ oopsy by the end of Friday... so much for any profit. Good thing its all subsidized taxpayer dollars.

(broken link removed to http://bangordailynews.com/2016/05/19/news/mid-maine/route-201-to-close-as-crew-removes-windmill-base-from-roadside/comments/)

Don't forget to read the comment section of each of the articles so you can get the locals opinions...
 
I only see one comment
 
Ok Wildo, let's go.

I agree with some things in your post, and disagree with others. We live in a capitalist system...some companies through some combination of good luck and good management succeed and make money and are stable, others are the opposite and fail. Seems that SunEdison effed up somewhere with their wind farm profit projections, or just payed their execs too much and went too far into debt, or whatever. It also appears that someone contracted to deliver a bigazz steel tube through that town was incompetent and blocked traffic for a day.

Ok, this capitalist wind power industry, in the US in 2015, employed 88,000 people, and was responsible for $15B in private (not govt) capital investments. There is no one company that dominates....many 'rust belt' heavy manufacturing outfits have been making the hardware like the one some azz dropped in your town, and it has been a lifesaver for whole communities. That investment constituted 40% of new US power generation capacity and ~20% of new electricity production added to the US last year.

Data: (broken link removed)

So, for an industrial enterprise of that scale, I would be really surprised that it didn't have all kinds of colossal eff-ups, accidents, killing people left and right. That road blockage that pissed you off, anyone get killed? Rather have an oilspill? A Natural Gas pipeline explosion? A derailed and exploded fracked oil train? With $15B invested last year, the fact that one $2B company should go chapter 11 is not really surprising, is it? There are another dozen like that one that appear to be making plenty of money....but no articles are being written about them in Bangor.

Of course, some people think wind turbines are ugly and don't want them in their community....ok, get together a referendum majority and zone your community as a 'no wind zone'. You can do that. Democracy in action. I'd support that. But it hasn't happened. That is because wind power and RE are POPULAR. Not a liberal scam only popular with some urban liberals that never have to look at the darned things, but popular with democrats, republicans, tea partiers and trumpistas. Basically more popular than any politician in office today, and up there with chocolate and puppies.

If a 'wind ban' referendum would pass **anywhere**, then there are plenty of politicians (not the kind I would like) that would have put them on the ballot. But it hasn't happened. Try banning Puppies and Chocolate, man.

That said, land costs money, land is a big part of the cost of wind, and land near lots of people and cities costs more....ergo, we should build these things where there are fewer people and land is cheap. Not in Eastern MA. Not a liberal plot. Capitalism. Some people in the backcountry that don't like the look of wind turbines will get pissed off by the outcome of our capitalist and democratic systems, and write angry comments on the Bangor news websites. Some people get to have refineries or power-plants built next to their houses...and they get mad, write letters and or move too, if they can.

Where we are going to disagree is this linky:

http://www.wnd.com/2016/05/sunedison-bankruptcy-exposes-climate-change-corruption/

which contains, sadly, falsehoods from start to finish. The good news, is that 'the truth will out'.

The bottom line is that Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is a real thing, and the decarbonization of our civilization must and will happen, and it will cost next to nothing when the dust settles, and we will all be healthier, wealthier and wiser afterwards. In New England, given the need for energy in winter, and the paucity of winter sunlight....that Renewable Energy is either going to be regional and largely wind based, or is going to get shipped in from a wind/solar plant thousands of miles away via HVDC, at a TBD markup. New Englanders get to choose: local wind or imported renewable energy.

The incentive system for producing RE in the US is a remarkably underfunded and shoestring operation compared to other countries (due to v skeptical politicians holding the pursestrings)....and seems to be working aok nonetheless due (IMO) to the abundance of the RE resources here, cheap land and cheap private equity. As much as I would have liked RE to have grown faster here than it did, wind and solar are getting off the ground, in a sensible and organic way.

One metric....the thing with wind is capacity factor, at good sites, the fraction of time they run is higher. If you are a capitalist putting your money on the line you are going to make damned sure that the wind is there before you break ground. If you are cashing a govt check and leaving, not so much. The aggregate capacity factor of US wind is significantly higher than the (on-shore) number for those other countries that are centrally planned (China) or used generous govt subsidies (EU). This is Exhibit A that the US wind industry is a lean, mean capitalist machine, and not some govt boondoggle (as some other countries efforts may have been at least in part). Exhibit B is, duh, the turbine owners only get paid over time for what electricity they produce....not for just building turbines as in many other countries.

As for offshore, it is still just too expensive to be profitable in the US capitalist system. If you want to build it (I think its a great idea) you need to elect pols that will cough up a ~5 cent/kWh 10 yr subsidy for offshore, rather than the mere 2.2 cent 10 years subsidy we have now (which is getting phased out to zero, BTW). You will have to convince your friends that such a govt-funded 5 cent subsidy is not creeping socialism. If someone says we could've subsidized building a whole fleet of offshore wind using the rounding error on the cost of the Iraq War....they're just being political and divisive.

IF you want to see scam boondoggles...we should talk about oil fracking sometime. After we had 'drill baby drill' we had Wall Street write $300B in junk bonds to support companies that produced (in the last five years) cumulatively ~6B barrels of oil. That is a $50/barrel 'junk bond subsidy' while those companies were supposedly selling oil at a profit for $100/barrel. Conclusion...the real price of making that oil was $150/barrel to break even. At the current price, those companies are bringing in <33% of what they need to stay afloat, and even if prices recovered to $100/barrel, they would still be bankrupt...there is no 'there' there. Its a SCAM. That entire industry is vapor-ware funded by junk bonds. Junk bonds that Wall Street got hefty commissions for writing, and which lost their mom and pop investors $300B, or $3000 per household in America. Now THAT there is a boondoggle. Thanks Obama.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: vinny11950
woodgeek said:
Ok Wildo, let's go.

I agree with some things in your post, and disagree with others. We live in a capitalist system...some companies through some combination of good luck and good management succeed and make money and are stable, others are the opposite and fail. Seems that SunEdison effed up somewhere with their wind farm profit projections, or just payed their execs too much and went too far into debt, or whatever. It also appears that someone contracted to deliver a bigazz steel tube through that town was incompetent and blocked traffic for a day.

Ok, this capitalist wind power industry, in the US in 2015, employed 88,000 people, and was responsible for $15B in private (not govt) capital investments. There is no one company that dominates....many 'rust belt' heavy manufacturing outfits have been making the hardware like the one some azz dropped in your town, and it has been a lifesaver for whole communities. That investment constituted 40% of new US power generation capacity and ~20% of new electricity production added to the US last year.
Click to expand...

Negative. Capitalism isn't being used here,,,so it can't be blamed. In a truely free market, you don't have taxpayer dollars being extorted from the populous to push government programs like the subsidization of wind.

A job 'created' by pulling money out of another taxpayer isn't a created job. It is a redistributed job. That ain't capitalism.

You kinda throw it around like it's a dirty word...when the lack of it is the root cause of our issues in this country.
 
peakbagger said:
Despite the hype, VATs have never been competitive with conventional turbines. Unfortunately you cant cheat physics which favors a conventional design. In the press VATs down low near the ground or attached to a building roof are quite popular but the reality is that the wind down near the ground or near a building is turbulent and much of the energy in the wind is wasted. VATs down near the ground should be regarded as moving kinetic sculptures rather than as a generator. It comes down to a conventional turbine blade is always producing power through 360 degrees of rotation while a VAT blade only produces power through 180 degrees of rotation, when it is on the return running opposite to the wind the blade is not producing power.
Click to expand...

These are all good points...and true. The 180 degrees of shifting forces creates stress and cyclical failures that are an absolute bear to design around. This causes the assembly to be 'beefed up' and drives the cost through the roof and makes most systems entirely unprofitable.

There are only two kinds of flow. Turbulent and laminar. Laminar only exists in very special cases and usually in just enclosed spaces like a tube or pipe...and even then usually only on the immediate inside of the pipe. Laminar is the absence of all cross winds...no shearing of the wind movement from any direction.
It should be assumed that all flow is turbulent unless proven to be laminar. I believe the point you're trying to make is that that wind is especially turbulent...but not laminar.
Just thought you might like to know. :)
 
sportbikerider78 said:
Negative. Capitalism isn't being used here,,,so it can't be blamed. In a truely free market, you don't have taxpayer dollars being extorted from the populous to push government programs like the subsidization of wind.

A job 'created' by pulling money out of another taxpayer isn't a created job. It is a redistributed job. That ain't capitalism.

You kinda throw it around like it's a dirty word...when the lack of it is the root cause of our issues in this country.
Click to expand...

Oh, capitalism is not a dirty word....its the water we all swim in. That said, there is no such thing an unregulated, purely capitalistic society on earth....different countries go for more or less regulation and central control of money. Compared to others, the US is low on the fed regulation scale, and somewhere in the middle regarding central control by the govt (if you include tax incentives in the total).

That said, the wind industry is not taxpayer funded. If you think it is, you should be happy since the 2.2 cent/kWh PTC is getting phased out over the next couple years. I guess they're gonna finally dynamite all those turbines and recycle the steel when they are declared economically useless in 2020, what a relief!

That said, would you invest your hard-earned savings in an oil fracking company these days? A lot of other people did. Or will all that boondoggle funded iron be getting recycled in 2020?

http://fortune.com/2016/03/25/fracking-bankruptcies/
http://247wallst.com/energy-business/2016/02/11/oil-patch-bankruptcies-soar-in-2015/
 
I did work for a wind turbine manufacturer at one point so I have some knowledge of wind turbine design compromises I just didn't want to go over folks heads. I guess I could modify my post to state that wind is far more turbulent near the ground then up into the air. Laminar flow is pretty rare but I have run into it with viscous liquids and it can really screw up the calculations, I am curious if the underwater turbine folks have to deal with laminar flow?
 
woodgeek said:
I guess they're gonna finally dynamite all those turbines and recycle the steel when they are declared economically useless in 2020, what a relief!
Click to expand...

One of the big issues with the first wind turbine boom was that most wind turbines have gear boxes and they typically at best had a seven year life, many of the early wind farms like at Altamont pass in CA had fields of dead turbines whose investors walked away. Regulators figured that out and most new farms have to post bonds to remove the turbines when they are abandoned. The newer turbines have far more robust gearboxes but failures are not unknown and my former employer has a unit without a gearbox but it has very little market penetration due to higher front end cost. Gearbox life can be extended by frequent maintenance and extensive instrumentation, but they still can and will fail. Rarely if ever does it make financial sense to deploy a large enough crane to replace one gearbox so the typical owner will just feather the blades and let it sit. Most wind turbine developers build the farm and rapidly dump it on some finance organization looking for long term cash flow and at some point if the books don't balance they walk and figure out the best way to get out from under it which is usually sell it to some smaller firm that then goes bankrupt. In theory the bonds for removal still exist but frequently they get "lost" along the way.
 
  • Like
Reactions: woodgeek, Wildo and begreen
woodgeek said:
Ok Wildo, let's go.

I agree with some things in your post, and disagree with others. We live in a capitalist system...some companies through some combination of good luck and good management succeed and make money and are stable, others are the opposite and fail. Seems that SunEdison effed up somewhere with their wind farm profit projections, or just payed their execs too much and went too far into debt, or whatever. It also appears that someone contracted to deliver a bigazz steel tube through that town was incompetent and blocked traffic for a day.

Ok, this capitalist wind power industry, in the US in 2015, employed 88,000 people, and was responsible for $15B in private (not govt) capital investments. There is no one company that dominates....many 'rust belt' heavy manufacturing outfits have been making the hardware like the one some azz dropped in your town, and it has been a lifesaver for whole communities. That investment constituted 40% of new US power generation capacity and ~20% of new electricity production added to the US last year.

Data: (broken link removed)

So, for an industrial enterprise of that scale, I would be really surprised that it didn't have all kinds of colossal eff-ups, accidents, killing people left and right. That road blockage that pissed you off, anyone get killed? Rather have an oilspill? A Natural Gas pipeline explosion? A derailed and exploded fracked oil train? With $15B invested last year, the fact that one $2B company should go chapter 11 is not really surprising, is it? There are another dozen like that one that appear to be making plenty of money....but no articles are being written about them in Bangor.

Of course, some people think wind turbines are ugly and don't want them in their community....ok, get together a referendum majority and zone your community as a 'no wind zone'. You can do that. Democracy in action. I'd support that. But it hasn't happened. That is because wind power and RE are POPULAR. Not a liberal scam only popular with some urban liberals that never have to look at the darned things, but popular with democrats, republicans, tea partiers and trumpistas. Basically more popular than any politician in office today, and up there with chocolate and puppies.

If a 'wind ban' referendum would pass **anywhere**, then there are plenty of politicians (not the kind I would like) that would have put them on the ballot. But it hasn't happened. Try banning Puppies and Chocolate, man.

That said, land costs money, land is a big part of the cost of wind, and land near lots of people and cities costs more....ergo, we should build these things where there are fewer people and land is cheap. Not in Eastern MA. Not a liberal plot. Capitalism. Some people in the backcountry that don't like the look of wind turbines will get pissed off by the outcome of our capitalist and democratic systems, and write angry comments on the Bangor news websites. Some people get to have refineries or power-plants built next to their houses...and they get mad, write letters and or move too, if they can.

Where we are going to disagree is this linky:

http://www.wnd.com/2016/05/sunedison-bankruptcy-exposes-climate-change-corruption/

which contains, sadly, falsehoods from start to finish. The good news, is that 'the truth will out'.

The bottom line is that Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is a real thing, and the decarbonization of our civilization must and will happen, and it will cost next to nothing when the dust settles, and we will all be healthier, wealthier and wiser afterwards. In New England, given the need for energy in winter, and the paucity of winter sunlight....that Renewable Energy is either going to be regional and largely wind based, or is going to get shipped in from a wind/solar plant thousands of miles away via HVDC, at a TBD markup. New Englanders get to choose: local wind or imported renewable energy.

The incentive system for producing RE in the US is a remarkably underfunded and shoestring operation compared to other countries (due to v skeptical politicians holding the pursestrings)....and seems to be working aok nonetheless due (IMO) to the abundance of the RE resources here, cheap land and cheap private equity. As much as I would have liked RE to have grown faster here than it did, wind and solar are getting off the ground, in a sensible and organic way.

One metric....the thing with wind is capacity factor, at good sites, the fraction of time they run is higher. If you are a capitalist putting your money on the line you are going to make damned sure that the wind is there before you break ground. If you are cashing a govt check and leaving, not so much. The aggregate capacity factor of US wind is significantly higher than the (on-shore) number for those other countries that are centrally planned (China) or used generous govt subsidies (EU). This is Exhibit A that the US wind industry is a lean, mean capitalist machine, and not some govt boondoggle (as some other countries efforts may have been at least in part). Exhibit B is, duh, the turbine owners only get paid over time for what electricity they produce....not for just building turbines as in many other countries.

As for offshore, it is still just too expensive to be profitable in the US capitalist system. If you want to build it (I think its a great idea) you need to elect pols that will cough up a ~5 cent/kWh 10 yr subsidy for offshore, rather than the mere 2.2 cent 10 years subsidy we have now (which is getting phased out to zero, BTW). You will have to convince your friends that such a govt-funded 5 cent subsidy is not creeping socialism. If someone says we could've subsidized building a whole fleet of offshore wind using the rounding error on the cost of the Iraq War....they're just being political and divisive.

IF you want to see scam boondoggles...we should talk about oil fracking sometime. After we had 'drill baby drill' we had Wall Street write $300B in junk bonds to support companies that produced (in the last five years) cumulatively ~6B barrels of oil. That is a $50/barrel 'junk bond subsidy' while those companies were supposedly selling oil at a profit for $100/barrel. Conclusion...the real price of making that oil was $150/barrel to break even. At the current price, those companies are bringing in <33% of what they need to stay afloat, and even if prices recovered to $100/barrel, they would still be bankrupt...there is no 'there' there. Its a SCAM. That entire industry is vapor-ware funded by junk bonds. Junk bonds that Wall Street got hefty commissions for writing, and which lost their mom and pop investors $300B, or $3000 per household in America. Now THAT there is a boondoggle. Thanks Obama.
Click to expand...


I agree with most of this, especially the fracking part.

My big issue is the lack of voice/deaf ears it all falls on. We are told we have a voice then the damn things get put up even though everyone said they didn't want it. The problem with an ordinance here is that you typically have a community of 2-3 organized townships surrounded by unorganized townships governed by the money hungry state. The UTs are all owned for the most part by huge REITs that only care about profits not the people who have to live here. It is good that they allow recreation on their lands and usually allow leases for camps for the most part though.

The cost to fight a wind farm development is too much, when the proponent's wallet is nearly endless in comparison to the opposition's. Hence me referring to it being forced down our throats.
 
The next place being eyeballed for development is the area around Moosehead lake. Quite possibly the largest and most beautiful undeveloped(aside from camps) area in the Northeast.

The opposition for this is well organized partly due to many rich folk from away not wanting to see the things. So hopefully we will win this one. However if history holds true we won't, all Mainers remember the fight with Plum Creek over development of the same area which nobody wanted, yet by backdoor deals, and good 'olboy cronyism passed. Even after a majority of the committee was found to be on the PC payroll, the plan for a thousand house lots and several resorts next to a state park was allowed to proceed. Thankfully nothing has happened yet.
 
That may just be the cheapest way to get it done. I wonder if that has been researched as a potential path.
I would assume it has but assuming has this funny track record.:confused:
 
13 hours total, @ $5 an hour for LP generator. 6 on Monday & 7 on Friday.
 
"In byNew England, given the need for energy in winter, and the paucity of winter sunlight....that Renewable Energy is either going to be regional and largely wind based, or is going to get shipped in from a wind/solar plant thousands of miles away via HVDC, at a TBD markup. New Englanders get to choose: local wind or imported renewable energy."

Ummm.. most likely from hydro Qubec, thanks canada

At least if you are in Massachusetts
 
  • Like
Reactions: woodgeek
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom