Monhegan Island Wind Project

As a result of the publicity surrounding the Fox Island Wind proposal, Monhegan Plantation Power District (MPPD) approached the Island Institute in August 2008 for advice and support for developing a wind-turbine project for their community. MPPD had just applied for an emergency rate increase to $.70 per kilowatt-hour, which makes Monhegan a community with one of the highest power costs anywhere in the country. Unlike the Fox Islands and Swan’s Island cases, Monhegan is not connected to the New England grid via a submarine cable (it is prohibitively expensive due to its distance from the mainland) and must barge diesel fuel to the island to generate power.

The Island Institute coordinated a public-information meeting this fall with the Monhegan community to present an overview of how the island might proceed with a wind-power analysis. The community was overwhelmingly in support of proceeding to the next level of analysis.  We followed up the first community meeting with a site visit in late September 2008 with the directors of MPPD and Northern Power Systems, a private company specializing in manufacturing small wind turbines that can be integrated into a “diesel-wind” hybrid system.

MPPD and the island community members then asked the Island Institute to submit a proposal with preliminary assessments of a potential wind-power project’s resource characteristics, logistical feasibility, environmental impacts and an analysis of the economics of a project, including the likely financial impact on MPPD and rate-payers and how a proposed project might be financed. We will develop and participate in a public-education and outreach campaign with MPPD to determine the interest of ratepayers and Monhegan residents for proceeding to the next, more costly phases of the project.

It is significant that Monhegan is not connected to the mainland grid and would produce more electric power in the winter than the community could use, for this presents an opportunity to study the feasibility of storing excess winter energy as ammonia and using it as a fuel to run slightly modified generators to produce summer power. Such an approach could demonstrate a model that would be vitally important to the entire state of Maine, because over 80 percent of Maine homes are heated in the winter with oil. As Maine’s former Governor Angus King has remarked, “If heating oil costs $4 per gallon, Maine will depopulate and become a national park.”

At Monhegan Town Meeting, voters approved an appropriation to fund the preliminary Phase I technical, financial and environmental studies.

We expect that the preliminary phase of Monhegan’s public discussion process would take 6-9 months and Phases II and III would take another 12-18 months leading to permit approvals and final siting.