FARMINGTON – The planning board on Monday night will hear about a proposal to install four wind turbines off Bailey Hill Road. The meeting begins at 6 p.m. in the downstairs conference room of the Municipal Building.
Last summer, representatives with Associated Wind Developers from Plymouth, Mass. began making inquiries for the project at the town’s code enforcement office. Steve Kaiser, code enforcement officer, handed copies of pertinent town ordinances to Brian Kuhn of AWD and Aeronautica Windpower, which sells 750 kilowatt, “Queen-sized” or smaller turbines for use in populated areas. The overall height of the 750 Series turbines proposed, according to Aeronautica Windpower’s product specifications, is between 241 feet up to 302 feet tall.
Konrad Baily of Bailey Farm, has registered with the town an intent to erect a 50-foot tall meteorological tower with an anemometer to measure wind speeds on his farmland off Bailey Hill Road, which is located a few miles east of High and Maple streets intersection in Farmington.
Matthew Damon, an associate site analyst with Associated Wind Developers, said in an email his company plans on “seeking to enter (into) a power purchase agreement with either a local municipality, school, or company that would be interested in purchasing green energy at or beneath the current retail rate through net-metering.”
Among the town ordinance copies Kaiser handed over was the proposed draft of the wind energy performance standards which is currently under zoning board construction. The draft presented last spring included a requirement the town be informed of proposed placement of residential and commercial wind energy systems and regulating permitting for such systems that included set backs, decibel level limits and other health and safety precautions. Voters at town meeting in April took no action on the advice of town officials until details, particularly decibel level limits, of the standards could be studied further.
According to Kaiser, AWD representatives said even though the updated standards hadn’t been adopted yet, they would be able to meet the standards should the project on Bailey Farm move forward. If built, it would be the first commercial wind power project in town.
Kaiser termed Monday’s presentation by AWD as “testing the waters.”
If tests of wind in that area are favorable, I say “go or it” A little less oil burned or coal smoke drifting ito our atmosphere !
The new State of Maine Motto: A windmill on every hill and casino in every town!!!!
I am very interested and in favor of Wind Power! Having lived all over the world I must admit that Maine is a little backwards when it comes to foreward thinking. I say a turbine on every hill!!!!!!!
Congratulations to the Bailey group.
I say let’s do it was well!
I built my house where I did for the view. I am for green energy but at the expense have to see and hear it.
But not at the expense of having to see and hear ir.
i think its a dumb idea . the fact that the migatory birds use this area alot should say it all but not only that the eyesore it brings to our community and the fact that the only ones that get anything out of it ids the turbine company and the land owner . it may create some jobs but they dont last . the jobs are gone asoon as the project is done then alkl you hear is the noise from the turbines . and living here on the hill i would beable to hear irt all the time i say no thanks to the wind project .
i have to sympathize with zipe’s sentiment: i built my house on top of a mountain so i wouldn’t have to see, hear, or smell any of the rest of you horrible people. it was a three days walk to civilization and i had to stockpile food and supplies all year just to survive through the winter. but the view was incredible.
eventually everybody else figured this out and people (probably from massachusetts) started building cabins and farms all around me. then some genius built a road nearby and all hell broke loose. people starting driving up and down in it automobiles and i couldn’t get any peace. next thing you know, power lines and telephone poles are going up all over the place. at some point the eyesore town of farmington was established and now that’s all i can see when i look out my front door. windmills are absolutely where i put my foot down.
don’t make me come down there.
I’d like to talk to AWD about putting a couple of wind turbines on my property.
You needed to buy the whole view. If you had bought it all, no one would put anything on it that you didn’t want there.
Go for it. Maybe they can sell power to the school To save them some money so they won’t keep whining about no money and having to make more cuts and administrators can get thier increases every year.
I’m all for alternitive energy and wind power is a good start. BUT!
I think there are better places to put a wind farm than downtown Farmington.
Four turbines???? Why bother $$
Only one person will benefit from this brain’storm and everyone around them will pay the price.
so where are we going to build the coal fired power plant or nuclear reactor as a back up when the wind is not blowing?
Wind power doesn’t work.
http://www.forbes.com/2011/07/19/wind-energy-carbon.html
I don’t care about birds, I don’t really care about your view, sound pollution etc. what really is wrong here is that the amount of money to install and maintain to money saved from power ratio does not equate to any actual money savings, never has. Create jobs? Yes. Stimulate economy? Yes, for a little while. The problem remains that until they come up with a maintenance free wind turbine over the long haul there just isn’t enough power generated to save any real money, sorry.
Bailey Hill Farm has the BEST raw milk in the area (sorry Bussy, personal opinion!). I wonder if the farm has considered the effect the construction, the noise, and the increased sub-sonic agitation in the atmosphere will have on the herd ….
When I read about the proposed turbines, I asked my sister-in-law who has done a lot of research on the subject, for her opinions on it. I also consider myself to be in the “for alternative energy and for jobs” camps. Here is the letter she sent me. She lives in Maine (Franklin County) for 6 months of the year (the winter part) and in Alaska the other six months.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Hi Sister-in-law, I thought I’d tell you about my evolution in the energy world. Four or five years ago there was a proposal to bring electricity to my part of the world (which we opposed on grounds of the development that would follow). It came, of course, and one day as I was sitting at one of the endless construction roadblocks it suddenly dawned on me that all the CONSTRUCTION vehicles had the APT logo (Alaska Power and Telephone). I thought, this is really wierd, why is this? and I started asking around. Turns out that nowadays power companies have two sides (at least), construction and operation. This matters.
Suppose your little town decided to build a school. You would get bonds and grants and the whole deal, and give the construction grant to the lowest bidder and in the end you would take ownership of a nice new school, the operation of which which would be up to you (and the state, of course), right? Power companies on the other hand pick out a place, say Farmington, where they can quietly assess their chances of persuading people that a power project would be nice (that would be that petition you signed). They schmooze with the mayor, etc, and go on about big Federal bucks and jobs and so on. They find a farmer with cashflow problems who maybe would like to retire, and persuade him what a great thing this would be for everybody. And then eventually they get to the point of the trial balloon- that’s the presentation to the local planning board. Where they go on about the “clean power of wind” and forget to mention anything else. All of this comes out of the company’s pocket, but hey, you gotta spend money to make money, right?
At this point they really get going. They slip a tentacle into the US treasury and start sucking up the funds. We (the US taxpayer) are still paying to build the entire facility, just like that school, but in the end we don’t own the thing, the power company does. Their construction side makes the huge bucks on construction, and then their operation wing makes the huge bucks on selling us the power. Cute. And there is a LOT of money in it, which is why so many people are racing to the trough. Understanding how this works makes it possible to explain how they can afford to build these things so far from the point of sale, which is Boston: that only costs us. To the company, the further it is the better, they don’t pay to build their own facilities, they are PAID to build. (Incidentally, pretending that they want to sell the power locally “at or below cost” is a common ploy, and who knows what “cost” might mean). Oh and there’s none of that old-fashioned crap about lowest bidders- in this game the guy who got in there first with his proposal wins, and he gets to charge whatever he likes, pretty much.
So what’s wrong with it? Well, does Farmington have a tourism economy? Everybody hates looking at these things. You’ll see them from all over town- they’ll be clearing the whole hilltop and of course a 300 or 400′ tower is a lot taller than anything around. If you are enjoying your rural lifestyle, living next to an industrial site will be a bit different. If you thought you were building equity in your property, bear in mind that nobody will buy it if you ever need to sell, but your taxes won’t go down to compensate. The elec company has power of eminent domain, they can put their huge high-tension power lines whereever they want, a nd of course your little rural road isn’t going to stay little. In fact Farmington has a lot of streets and roads that will need to be “improved” to allow this construction (and do you think they’ll stop at three towers?).
I listened to a presentation last year from a construction engineer who builds these things in places like ND, who urged people in Maine to fight them to the last breath, basically. He said, “You can’t live next to these things”. So get on the Internet, look at how other towns in Maine are fighting them or what life there is like now they’re built. Look at Friends of the Highland Mountains and the other sites. Print out everything you can find, go to meetings, hand out information. At least go down fighting. love, Sally
I recommend driving over to Roxbury on Rte 17 (between Mexico and Byron) and seeing Angus King’s Record Hill project under construction. Those turbines are taller, but you’ll get the basic idea. To me, they are a disgrace–ruining three mountains in a very scenic area. I understand that many people don’t care how they look or find them “majestic.” I find mountains majestic, but that’s just me. They can be seen from Tumbledown and other vistas. All the data is out there about how pretty useless these things are, but I’ll leave that to the good people of Farmington to see for themselves.
SO WHATS WRONG WITH STICKIN THE THINGS OFF SHORE WERE YA DONT SEE UM????
and like the man says they sell the power to other states,maine dont git nothing from it ,
I still have some trouble with your building a house to enjoy a view of my land and then telling me what I can and can’t do on it!
thats what flat landers do tom… they buy land build houses and think they can tell us what to do.
amen tom.
http://www.forbes.com/2011/07/19/wind-energy-carbon.html
I will post this again, wind power is a lie.