Re: “Our View: Maine lost opportunity by rejecting Statoil” (July 20):

I am a member of Maine’s Citizens’ Task Force on Wind Power and Saving Maine, two well-informed organizations that advocate responsible, fact-based assessments of wind projects. We are not NIMBYS, or, as you stated, “conspiracy theorists and climate change deniers.”

Wind developers resort to name-calling because they cannot defend their position with facts. It is laughable that representatives of the wind lobby in Maine have even claimed that we’re funded by oil companies. To shed clear light on wind lobby propaganda, we spend our own money and devote our own time.

You stated that land-based wind power is becoming increasingly competitive. That’s what wind developers keep saying, but it’s still false. Without government loan guarantees, energy tax credits, carbon cap-and-trade credits and investment tax credits, not a single land-based wind farm would be built in Maine. If wind power can stand alone, why does the entire industry put projects on hold while they wait for production tax credits to be renewed?

Maine wind projects certainly do bleed subsidy money from the taxpayers to line the pockets of a wealthy few.

As Warren Buffett stated in an April 28 interview with Fortune magazine: “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” Nor does destroying Maine’s last best places to generate supposedly “green” power for Rhode Island, or Massachusetts, in exchange for an environmental travesty in Maine.

Wind power has not been smeared. I challenge you to go to the websites of both organizations, read our statements and cite one criticism of wind power that is untrue.


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