The defeat by the Maine House of Representatives of a bill designed to pave the way for a significant offshore wind energy manufacturing facility is concerning and frustrating. This is a major opportunity that should not be blown.
The 100-acre site on Penobscot Bay, selected by the Mills administration in February after much evaluation, became a point of serious contention in recent weeks.
At times, the argument over its fate appeared to pit environmentalists against environmentalists; those focused on the preservation of the coastline and the site’s wildlife against those focused on the urgent need for Maine to support an offshore wind industry with a longer-term and further-reaching rationale: the mitigation of climate change.
The bill that failed in the House would have authorized the Department of Environmental Protection to grant a permit to build the terminal on a site featuring a system of coastal sand dunes. The proposal drew supposedly environmental arguments out of unlikely corners. A right-wing news site, complaining “Gov. Mills thinks she can change the weather,” posted an op-ed warning that Sears Island could “be the next victim of Maine’s radical climate agenda.”
What’s radical about an attempt to forge an offshore wind industry in 2024 – in a place where the winds are among the strongest and most consistent on earth? We’re not sure.
Opponents to the siting seem to have lost sight of the bigger picture. Let it be said: It’s not a pretty picture. The climate emergency is making uncomfortable demands of communities the world over. Reminders of the unfolding climate crisis are everywhere, Maine’s latest warm and destructive winter among them. Our grid is going to need the power and our energy mix must get away from carbon. The trade-offs can be undesirable but must be made.
“At least Sears Island is safe for now,” a user of the social network X, formerly Twitter, posted after the House vote last week. Safe for now.
At what cost? At the costs of hundreds of well-paid permanent manufacturing jobs – by one estimate, Maine could gain up to 33,000 short-term and 13,000 long-term jobs – and a significant setback to the state’s appropriately ambitious climate goals.
If we do not move to green energy sources and reduce our reliance on carbon, none of our beloved environments will be “safe.”
The excess of caution expressed in the vote seems, at best, to disregard the fact that the legislation would have only allowed the Department of Environmental Protection to proceed with the Sears Island project after a state and federal permitting process with all laws and relevant rules complied with.
This is not the Catch-22 situation that opponents to the turbine port would have you believe. Rockland legislator Rep. Valli Geiger, a self-professed environmentalist, put it well in an interview with the Press Herald. Geiger said she struggled with the prospect of the Legislature needing to “roll back sand dune regulations because they’re in the way of development.”
In the end, though, she said she supported the rollback, recognizing the critical environmental need for the wind port.
“Ultimately, for me it’s the larger overarching issue of climate change that has led me to ‘yes,’” Geiger told the paper.
Fifteen years ago in 2009, then-Gov. John Baldacci’s Ocean Energy Task Force formally reported on the promise of wind to supply energy to Maine and to make it a “net energy exporter.” Due to relentless foot-dragging and other obstructionism, we have not even begun to realize that vision.
The longer this kind of unproductive and complacent zig-zagging continues, the longer we squander the high-quality wind that blows in the Gulf of Maine. Offshore wind is estimated to be in a position to generate about half the renewable energy needed by Maine by the end of the next decade. If we get started on it. Events of last week show us that it’s still an unacceptably big “if.”
Maine simply can’t afford to continue like this, economically or environmentally. There is no perfect location for an offshore wind turbine port. Years have passed since the development of this industry was first mooted and still, despite knowing better, we are running down the clock. These hard realities should make people who continue to stand in the way of obligatory progress think twice.
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