This "Letter to the Editor" was written in April of 2010 by Greg Perkins, a licensed soils scientist and Highland Plantation tax payer, in response to an op-ed published in the Waterville Sentinel. Greg and his wife are owners of the cabin which will be closest to the Highland Wind project, if built.
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The truth is that logging roads and skidder trails are nothing like the roads that are actually being built to haul each turbine (3 MW - nearly 390 tons of metal) to the mountaintop - or what is left of the mountaintop. These roads are not like narrow skidder trails where protective organics are left in place and no fill is required.
A road to support loaded turbine transport trucks needs to be designed and built to support at least 90 tons of weight and is typically over 50 feet wide (width of two lanes of I-95). A road system in a typical industrial wind development in the western Maine mountains may be a long as 15 -20 miles and requires hundreds of thousands of yards of aggregate material to be installed on the mountain side to conquer the 30%-50% slopes and switchbacks. Where the slopes are too steep, the mountain is blasted away.
A devastating impact created by climate change is the removal and/or destruction of the plants and animals that exist in a habitat or ecosystem, essentially destroying it. This is the very same impact generated by an industrial wind development on a fragile mountain ecosystem, only the wind development takes much less time to do its destructive work – it is immediate.
The author ends his letter by asking. “If anyone can come up with a cleaner source of power than wind, I'd like to hear it.” After thinking about all the carbon that is pumped into the atmosphere to build, transport, and site just one industrial turbine, I can come up with several cleaner sources – hydro, solar, wood, natural gas, oil…just name one.
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