ROXBURY, Maine — Four hundred year-round and seasonal residents here received the first of three payments this year for electricity from Record Hill Wind LLC.
The $44,628 in state-required tangible benefits was doled out in checks for $111.57. The amount is based on the standard Central Maine Power rate for the power generation portion of residents’ bills, Gordon Gamble, director of community relations for the 22-turbine wind farm, said.
“This is the start of it per the agreement for the life of the project for 20 years and it goes with the property,” he said.
“We call it ‘Power to the People.’ As far as we know, we’re the first company that’s done something like this in this framework.”
The amount is based on 500 kilowatt-hours multiplied by whatever the CMP standard offer is at the time for power generation, he said.
There are only three payments this year, whereas there will be four next year, one per quarter.
“This year, we didn’t do the first [quarterly payment] because we weren’t really up and running,” Gamble said.
The 22-turbine wind farm began sending power to the grid in January.
“We’re operating as expected, if not a little bit better,” he said.
Some of the turbines are going through their first 500-hour servicing now, which is why blades of two turbines on the north side of Mine Notch weren’t moving on Tuesday, he said. They’re undergoing regular maintenance service.
Gamble said the service is expected to be completed on all turbines in June.
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Distributed by MCT Information Services.
If “Power to the People” is all about the wind developers using rate payers’ tax dollars to build their project even tho they could easily have financed it themselves, asking for a TIF from the town, keeping most of the refunded tax monies and then handing the residents a few coins to jingle in their pockets on a quarterly basis in exchange for transfiguring their mountains and lowering their quality of life and property values, I’d classify that as a major power “outage”.