Hydro power less expensive than wind power

To the Editor:

First, it starts as a so-called investment. Billions of dollars of taxpayer money is directed into the erection of wind energy facilities with intentions of producing enough power to replace 20 percent of all the coal and fossil fuel generators nationwide.

Wind is not meant to replace hydro-power as hydro does not produce those nasty pollutants, but it happens. It is worth mentioning that hydro power is far less expensive than wind power and just as clean and far more reliable. Reliability is so important in the electric industry, the electric customer pays extra for it, so, that CMP can say "flip the switch, we will be there."

Is it possible to replace 20 percent of all the coal and fossil fuel plants with wind? Surely, it’s possible, but, at great cost to the electric customers. Wind, is simply, more expensive than plants already in place. Contract prices for wind are showing up at three times the average market rates.

And then, there is the reliability factor. Part of every electric billing is attributed to maintaining reliability, a very sophisticated set of procedures that favors the known over the unknown. In other words, if the market can know what a plant can deliver to the market ahead of time, the more reliable it can be and this helps keep costs down. Wind is the most unreliable of all plants and as they multiply, the cost of reliability multiplies.

What wind power has managed to achieve is to provide stimulus money to select few. Landowners who have sold property to wind developers, host towns/territories, wind developers and their investors. If wind power was to provide an advantage to electric customers, then, all well and good, but giving up good property for such a lousy use of resource and burdening electric customers with soaring prices is nonsense.

As one man put it, "It would be cheaper for the electric customers to pay the landowners to not allow wind turbines to be built on their land!"

Dan McKay,

Dixfield