Second public hearing today on the Bingham Wind Project

By Mike Lange
Staff Writer

    BINGHAM — The Maine Department of Environmental Protection will hold the second of two public meetings on the Bingham Wind Project on Wednesday, Feb. 12 at the Quimby School in Bingham at 6 p.m.
    Blue Sky West, LLC and Blue Sky West II, LLC filed a Natural Resources Protection Act permit application and a site location of development permit application with the Department on April 19, 2013 to construct a 62-turbine, up to 206-megawatt wind power generation facility in Bingham, Mayfield Township and Kingsbury Plantation.

    The first public meeting on July 22 last year drew more than 100 people to Moscow Elementary School. Supporters said the project will bring much-needed jobs to a depressed rural area along with $2.1 million in property taxes per year.
    Opponents, however, claim that the turbines are not economically feasible and will permanently scar the landscape of some of Maine’s most scenic areas.
    The project will include up to five permanent meteorological towers, a 34.5kv electrical collector system, an electrical substation and an operations and maintenance building. In addition, the project includes a 17-mile, 115kv transmission line running from Kingsbury Plantation to a Central Maine Power substation in Parkman.
    The height of the turbines would range from 489 to 492 feet, and they’d be placed on Johnson Mountain and various unnamed ridges and hills in the vicinity of Route 16, according to the DEP staff analysis of the application.
    The proposed project has been reviewed by the Land Use Planning Commission (LUPC) and the agency certified that the project complies with all “relevant provisions of the LUPC’s land use standards.”
    The analysis noted that a lot of commercial timber harvesting takes place in the area, and several logging roads can be upgraded as part of the project.
    Also, the DEP noted, “The applicants submitted signed copies of leases, easements and purchase and sale options for the properties on which the proposed project would be located.”
    In addition to property taxes, the applicants propose annual payments to the towns of Bingham ($106,900), Moscow ($20,000), Abbot ($20,000), Parkman ($20,000) and  Kingsbury Plantation ($176,000), based on $5,530 per turbine per year for 20 years, which exceeds the statutory requirement of $4,000 per turbine per year.
    A link to the complete, 31-page DEP analysis at www.maine.gov/dep.