Who removes the turbines when they stop working?
According to King and Gardiner’s DEP application, they do not intend to set aside any money to remove the turbines, hoping that the project will be profitable enough to begin making payments to a sinking fund beginning after the eleventh year of operation. They also take the position that removing the turbines is not their responsibility if they fail to operate due to circumstances beyond their control. Like, if the wind does not blow as expected, or the market for undependable and non dispatchable wind power dries up, or subsidies are finally eliminated as government catches on to the wind industry’s scam on taxpayers.
Assuming they were somehow forced to remove the turbines, they provide a cost estimate of $800,000 to restore the entire 22 turbine site, roads, electric lines, foundations. Given that it will cost over $100 million to build the wind farm, is it reasonable that it could all be undone for less than 1% of the cost of construction?
They estimate the salvage value of each obsolete 113 ton turbine to be $113,000 or about $1000 per ton. Current steel scrap prices are about $100 per ton. If the true cost of removing the turbines in today’s scrap market was included in their decomissioning cost estimate, the projected cost to remove the turbines would increase by $100,000 per turbine, or $2.2 million dollars. The decomissioning cost would be closer to $3 million instead of the $800,000 estimate in the DEP application. This assumes that their projections for equipment costs and site and road restoration are accurate, but if they understate the scrap value of the turbines by 90%, why would we believe any of their numbers?
The obvious answer to the question of who removes the turbines is probably no one.
Roxbury voters are taking a huge risk of having abandoned turbines on the ridges long after they have ceased to operate. As the blades delaminate and snap, the sight of these decrepit turbines will be a sad reminder of the bad decisions of Roxbury’s current citizens. Tax payments will have long since disappeared along with the promise of free electricity. Roxbury, once the home of one of Maine’s most beautiful ponds, will instead become the home of Maine’s most impressive junk yard.
1 year ago