Here's an article that introduces the industrial wind debate to southern New Hampshire. It appears to be fair and objective. Unfortunately the article makes it sound like the Lempster wind facility is inevitable, and there is a lone dissident among all of NH's citizens?!

Lisa Linowes of Windham finds herself in an uncomfortable spot these days: She has become the public face of opposition to what sounds like a wonderful idea, New Hampshire’s first serious proposal for a wind farm. “It’s almost politically incorrect to say wind isn’t a good thing,” Linowes said recently. “That’s the reaction of many people: It’s clean energy, no cost, what’s the problem? . . . And people think if I oppose wind farms I must be in favor of dirty electricity. “But show me one coal-fired plant that is going to come down as a result of a wind facility going up. It won’t happen.” “I’m sort of on a mission,” she said. “The whole wind industry – it really is a scam, a tax avoidance opportunity for big companies, and we’re getting so little in return.” “Scam” is a fighting word, but then so is “NIMBY,” the acronym for a selfish, “not-in-my-back-yard” mentality.“NIMBYs are always against a project on aesthetic grounds, because they don’t like the way it looks,” said Harley Lee, head of Endless Energy, which has been involved in several attempts to get wind farms going in Maine. “But they often bring up other issues. They suddenly become interested in birds – ‘Thousands of birds will die’ – or sound – ‘It’s so noisy!’ ” Such debate is hardly new, as Cape Cod knows from the long, angry argument over a proposed offshore wind farm, but it’s new to New Hampshire. A few scattered windmills exist in the state, but the Lempster Mountain Wind Project, a proposed 30-megawatt facility halfway between Keene and Lake Sunapee, is the first commercial wind farm to make it to the serious design phase. If all goes well, including hearings before the Public Utilities Commission and Department of Environmental Services, the Pennsylvania-based company hopes to have 15 to 20 turbines generating electricity by next spring. “We’re not quite sure how much effect it has, (being first),” said Jeff Keeler, director of business development in New England for Community Energy, which is developing the roughly $35 million project. “My sense is that the agencies will probably take a little bit more time looking at it before giving permits. . . . But I wouldn’t anticipate there being a tremendous delay based on it being the first.” Impact on Lempster By some standards, the Lempster proposal is small. It will generate less electricity in a year than Seabrook Station – the state’s only nuclear power plant – does in a day, creating power for about 10,000 homes. Its annual output will be less than 1 percent of Public Service of New Hampshire’s annual total. Yet for Lempster, a town of 1,000 people, it’s huge: The estimated construction cost of the project is nearly half the total assessed value of all land in town. “Right now, I have (heard) no real negative things about it from people who live in town,” said Everett Thurber, chairman of the Lempster Board of Selectmen. “I think most people support it, as much as they know (about it).” Compounding uncertainty is the lack of zoning in Lempster, which means there are no formal public hearings on the plan, although there have been a couple of informal discussions between company representatives and selectmen, including one that drew roughly 15 people. “They were very informative meetings,” Thurber said. But it was “almost like playing poker: Nobody showed their hand.” Lack of precedent doesn’t help. For example, even though at about 215 feet tall the towers would dwarf anything around, Lempster isn’t sure whether they require building permits. Community Energy has applied for such permits, just in case. Lack of precedent leads to financial uncertainty, too. In theory, the owners of the towers should pay property tax to Lempster, greatly increasing the town’s collection, currently about $1.8 million a year. But the history of utility projects shows state government might take that income, Thurber said. “When it looks good – what percentage are they (the state) going to grab?” he said. “That’s what we don’t know.” There is also a question as to the effect the towers will have on the current-use status of the properties, which are owned by four local residents and one out-of-towner and would be leased to Community Energy. If large portions of the land become taxable at full rates, Lempster would benefit greatly. Finally, Lempster is proceeding cautiously partly because it was burned by a regional landfill that was supposed to be a financial windfall but turned into a problem. “We’re leery,” Thurber said. “But we’re interested.” Elsewhere in New England Lempster Mountain is also huge for wind power in New Hampshire, which is slightly behind its neighbors in this area. Vermont has New England’s only serious wind farm: The six-megawatt Searsburg facility, about an hour west of Keene, with 11 towers that are about two-thirds the size of those proposed for Lempster. Completed in 1997 for $11 million, including $4 million in federal grants, it provides electricity for about 2,000 homes and has become a minor tourist attraction. Massachusetts has a few facilities, including a small one on Wachusett Mountain that has received permission from the town of Princeton to be upgraded to roughly the size of the Lempster project. It also has several in the works, including two in the Berkshires and the proposed Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound. At about a dozen times bigger than the Lempster plan, Cape Wind would be the country’s first major offshore project and has already become the proposal drawing the most dissent. Maine has no wind farms but has several projects in the works that are as big or bigger than the Lempster plan, including a 50-megawatt project on Mars Hill. Until now, though, no proposal in New Hampshire has even made it to the planning stages. In fact, earlier this year the town of Lyman even turned down a proposal to set up a wind-speed-measuring device as a company’s first step in deciding where to put a farm. That battle brought the issue before Windham’s Linowes, who’s moving to Lyman. “I never really gave it much thought until we started looking at what it all meant,” she said. Lempster Mountain may also be the closest that a wind farm ever gets to Nashua. Maps of wind power potential in New Hampshire show that the only other potential locations in the region are near Mount Monadnock, where debate about aesthetics would likely make development all but impossible. Financial concerns Of particular concern, Linowes says, are the complex finances and tax write-offs that lead out-of-state, for-profit companies to develop wind farms. “Florida Power and Light – which owns most of the wind facilities in the U.S. – paid no federal income taxes in 2003 and 2002 on income of $2 billion,” she said. She points to tax fights around wind farms in Pennsylvania and argues that if such government support is ever removed, windmills are uneconomic and would become a burden on ratepayers. Certainly it isn’t just market forces that are leading to wind farms, including the Lempster proposal. At current market rates, the electricity produced at Lempster Mountain will be worth about $4.5 million a year, although PSNH is likely to pay less than that because the utility would spend $2.5 million to connect the system to the power grid. The utility and developers are negotiating a long-term contract, which will have to be approved by the Public Utilities Commission. Almost as important to the deal, however, is something called Renewable Energy Certificates, or RECs. RECs were established under a federal program as an incentive for companies building alternative-energy plants, which produce electricity too expensive to be sold on the open market. RECs are required from utility companies doing business in participating states, including Massachusetts and Connecticut, to show that a certain percentage of electricity is being generated by renewable sources. Utilities that don’t meet the renewable goals can buy RECs from places that do. The price for these RECs fluctuates on the open market, rather like stock prices, depending on supply and demand: They tend to be more expensive in New England, because there are fewer wind farms here. As part of their deal, PSNH will buy the RECs generated by the Lempster wind farm and use them or resell them. Keeler, of Community Energy, estimated the RECs associated with Lempster Mountain would be worth “about half” the electricity produced there. “They’re a significant factor,” he said. “They are the element that makes up the gap between the cost of wind energy and the cost of conventional power generation. “It’s all part of the negotiation. The ideal situation for a developer of wind is to package both together into a reasonable long-term price.” This does not include the federal energy production tax credit, which provides a 1.8-cent tax benefit per kilowatt-hour for the first 10 years of a facility’s operation. Under PSNH estimates of the Lempster site’s output, this credit could be around $1.2 million per year. Why not wind? The argument in favor of wind farms is straightforward: It’s clean, renewable energy that could replace oil or coal. The arguments against them are more varied and have produced debate even within the environmental community, where the desire for renewable energy has clashed with various concerns. One concern is the effect on birds and bats. This has been mitigated somewhat by changes in design – the Lempster windmills will spin only about two-thirds as fast as the Searsburg windmills – and more attention to avoiding migration paths: Some state Audubon Society chapters now support windmills. Another concern is noise. Some people living near windmills have reported annoying hums or deep, pulsing sounds, although many others report no problems. A major concern is effect on the local environment not just from the towers, which have a relatively small “footprint,” but from the supply roads and power lines needed to construct and maintain them. Large construction is rare atop New Hampshire’s ridgelines, leading to worry about such things as erosion. Most important, though, is aesthetics, as anybody involved in any cell-tower debate knows. Distaste at the thought of rows of big, spinning windmills atop New England’s hills is so great that it has even come up on the skiing-related Web site Snow Journal, where participants most admire mountains that are covered with lodges and ski lifts. It has also led the Appalachian Mountain Club, probably New Hampshire’s most prominent environmental group, to temper a strong pro-renewable-energy stance. The club says efforts would be better spent on cleaning up existing energy plants and supporting conservation. Since tourism is the second-largest industry in New Hampshire, fear of despoiling scenic ridges has an economic angle, too. “Our experience is that the individuals who live in the community (of a wind farm), they’re all for it,” said Chad Laurent, program coordinator of green energy programs for Mass Energy, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit that backs wind farms. “It’s people who are from other parts of New England, who have vacation homes, who are more staunchly opposed to these projects.” Finally, there’s the question of balance. The most optimistic proposal doesn’t see wind power supplying more than 5 percent of America’s electricity needs in the coming decade, and even that would require a huge increase in the number of wind farms. Linowes thinks the situation parallels debate over drilling for oil in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. “It comes down to: What are you getting? How many ridgelines would you have to destroy to produce the equivalent of Seabrook?” she said. “It’s so out of balance, the impact is huge next to the little gains we get.” Supporters of wind power hope at least some of this opposition is because of fear of the unknown. Some point to a survey of people around Searsburg – commissioned by a wind-farm developer – that said “strong support” for the wind farm there increased from 30 percent before it was built to 52 percent a year after construction, while opposition fell from 35 percent to 17 percent. “Right now, if we want to show people a wind farm, we have to drive all the way to Vermont,” said Lee, of Endless Energy. “When there are a few more in higher visibility areas, a few more will be able to see them – I think there will be a little less resistance, more people in our favor.” If so, Linowes wants it to be clear she won’t be one of them. “I would like to see the millions (of dollars) being sent to these wind companies in the form of tax credits and appreciation programs – if that money was put into cleaning up these coal facilities, you could take them a long way,” she said. “It’s almost as if the wind companies were a distraction. We’re thinking that we might be able to replace the coal plant with windmills, so we don’t need to clean it up – but that’s never going to happen.”

http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050612/NEWS01/106120075