MDI's uneven power map comes into sharp relief as citizens referendum looms large
Other news: LUZO committee at inflection point; MD supporter of workforce housing candidate for PB; How Anne Napier got the harbormaster office approved in SWH; MDI's tricky emergency evacuation plan
TREMONT, Aug. 26, 2023 - This is the interactive map of the “hosting capacity” of Versant’s power grid on MDI and it shows an island with an energy apartheid. As you can see, the northeastern half has received the most investment in the grid. Click on the map to expand colored coded sections with red being the lowest capacity.
Most of the light green is Acadia National Park. All the heavy capacity areas marked green, blue, purple and yellow are in Bar Harbor, Somesville and Northeast Harbor.
Everything on the Quietside is in red.
Ironically, residents of Bar Harbor who are loathe to give credit to the tourism industry and have lived under the heavy breath of its stormy gyre may be grateful that they were protected from extreme weather events like the storm last Christmas while it took days for the southern part of the island to regain power.
All the hotels, COA, Jackson Labs and other voracious energy consumers pushed the demand for uninterrupted usage and no concession for anything less.
So the utility company built them a reliable power grid, with sub stations nearby.
Meanwhile, the entire southwest half of the island faces an energy insecurity where one ice storm could keep the Quietside truly quiet for days.
The promise of a “public” utility is that the public shall be served equally, irrespective of location and income. The reality is that it costs more to support a rural infrastructure than one more densely populated.
So it’s open season on Maine’s two private utilities, especially with the citizens initiative to take public control of CMP and Versant. We are just 73 days from the vote on Question 3 on whether to create the Pine Tree Power Company, governed by an elected board, and allow it to acquire all investor-owned transmission and distribution utilities in Maine.
The rhetoric is reaching a fevered pitch.
“Turns out, CMP and Versant are more interested in taking millions for their distant shareholders than taking care of our grid,” stated Pine Tree Power on its website. “Their neglect has left Maine with the most frequent power outages in the nation.
As to how we got to the state of the energy divide on MDI, Beth Woolfolk, manager of renewable energy planning and policy for A Climate to Thrive, wrote this history for a recent talk:
“As we’ve built more and more clean energy projects that are driven and owned by our community, we’ve slowly begun to understand the history, status, and current inequity of our electric grid.
“MDI’s story is similar to many other coastal communities across the state, and it goes like this: The first electrical wires were built on the island in 1912, and as the island's population grew, the grid expanded to meet the needs of the community, including the fishing, and tourism industries.
“However, the island’s more affluent and tourist heavy east side has received significant electrical upgrades over the years, while Tremont and parts of Southwest Harbor have been left with what the utility refers to as a ‘legacy system’ built many, many decades ago.
“As anyone living on the west side of MDI knows, the grid is vulnerable to frequent and prolonged outages. Not only that, but because the grid has been so poorly maintained, clean energy projects that reduce energy burden like co-op solar, often either cannot interconnect or must pay far more to fix the grid in order to interconnect. At ACTT, we have been working on several pathways to address this.”
The battle for clean energy is hand-to-hand as hundreds of projects sit idle awaiting action by the companies.
“Their neglect has left Maine with the most frequent power outages in the nation. Unlike CMP and Versant, Pine Tree Power will be a trusted partner for our future. With a nonprofit utility, our money will stay in Maine to make the investments that will reduce outages, transition to clean energy, and connect Mainers to broadband.”
But even Bar Harbor is not immune to the vagaries of the utility music chairs.
Two weeks have gone by since Bar Harbor expected to hear from Versant for its Higgins Pit project. A Versant spokesperson confirmed that “our engineering team has not yet completed the system impact study needed for that interconnection."
“Independent System Operators and Regional Transmission Operators in all areas of the country are significantly behind on interconnection reviews,” said Versant Communications manager Judy Long.
“Everyone is struggling to keep up with the unprecedented numbers of projects. The state-level study process, including Versant Power’s, are no exception. There are a limited amount of resources -- very skilled and highly technical resources -- available to conduct such studies and we are being affected.”
Then there is the cost.
Versant is charging on average $32,258 to connect a solar array of 250 to 500 kilowatts and $67,542 for one between 100 kW and 250 kW, according to a report from the PUC. CMP charges only $20,000.
This has riled solar businesses and Pine Tree Power, which stated in May that $82 million in dividends was paid to Versant’s owner, the City of Calgary, Canada.
Instead of investing in infrastructure and managing cost, “Millions are going straight from our pockets to Canada!” Pine Tree Power stated.
“So why is a city government in Canada getting rich while 30,000 Versant customers in Maine are getting disconnection notices?
“The answer lies in Versant’s ownership structure. In 2020, Emera Maine was sold to Enmax, a corporation wholly owned by the city of Calgary, Canada. Its name was changed to Versant Power, and the exploitation began. Ever since, the money we’ve paid on our utility bills has gone toward lining the pockets of these distant owners. To top it all off, it was just announced that Versant customers will suffer a 14 percent distribution rate hike this July, and another 12.5 percent in January 2024. Mainers can’t keep up with this blatant profiteering.”
Judy Long replied that it’s unfair to compare Versant, which serves more rural communities, with CMP, whose customers are more densely populated.
“We have 10,400 square miles that we serve and we've only got 160,000 customers across that territory. So for comparison, CMP, which has a footprint almost about the same size as ours - 11,000 square miles - they have more than 600,000 customers. So there is more capacity on their lines because they build them to serve more customers.”
“If you're in New York City, the roadways are a four-lane highways with a lot of traffic lights and a lot of signs. In Tremont, you've got a two-way road without even any markings on it.
“You don't need this sort of road infrastructure in Tremont that you need in New York City because you don't have this sort of traffic.
“Our threshold to interconnect before needing to upgrade equipment to be able to hold more capacity is much lower than a big large utility and even CMP, which again is about five or six times more dense than we are across our service territory.
“We're held to a standard, like we're not allowed to build a four-way highway equivalent to a transmission and distribution system, because we don't serve a four- way highway worth of customers. So always the Public Utilities Commission has asked us to just do what's safe, reasonable, reliable and sufficient for the population we serve.
“In fact, if we tried to build a system that could accommodate limitless exchange of energy for anyone that wants to sell it, that would be deemed imprudent, and it's sometimes called gold plating. You'll hear that term used.
“We build what's sufficient. But what happens when you have a solar system installed in your roof if you want to totally produce enough solar so that you get enough credits in the summer and can live off that for a year and pay nothing on your electricity bill. They're gonna build that system to put out about seven times more than you use at your peak in your house. And so everybody on a system is pumping out seven times what they use onto the distribution system, which was never built to be a two way exchange of energy. You start to need to install equipment in order to make sure that your neighbor doesn't see a voltage surge when you start exporting energy onto the grid.”
All that said, it doesn’t help their cause for CMP and Versant to rank dead last in survey after survey of consumer satisfaction, Versant in the East Region of the Mid-size segment in the 2022 J.D. Power Residential customer satisfaction survey, and CMP in the East Region, Large segment.
Pine Tree Power said among large utilities, consumer-owned utilities are leading the way to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change while CMP has actively hampered renewable energy expansion efforts in Maine, even killing a popular roof-top solar bill in 2017.
Pine Tree Power has access to low-cost capital that CMP and Versant don’t because it can borrow money at a lower interest rate.
On Nov. 7, voters will decide whether to buy into that promise.
Is Mount Desert land-use committee at an inflection point?
NORTHEAST HARBOR - Has the town’s Land-Use Zoning Advisory Committee out-lived its usefulness?
This is a committee with no chair, no parliamentary rules and no informed data other than the opinions of a consultant and at least one member with a clear conflict of pecuniary interest.
But more fundamentally, what was the goal when the LUZO committee was created more than 10 years ago and is it still the best vehicle to achieve those goals?
The quarterly meeting on Aug. 15 saw select board member Rick Mooers asking such questions.
“When this group was initially adopted, we started to review the LUZO because it kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And to take a critical look at what no longer fits our town, what can be repealed, what to be replaced."
“Then we started taking on these tasks of what else do we need? And we began creating new ordinances," Mooers said.
“So the result now is the LUZO started to get thicker, thicker and thicker.
“I think it would be helpful and probably useful for us from time to time to take a look at the entire LUZO and see what is still working in our town and what isn't. And if it isn't, let's get rid of it.
“There are things that are just dangling in the LUZO that get in the way of some of our citizens wanting to do certain things.
“I just want a work product that works best for us. And if we all take a little bit of responsibility to read the LUZO and question what's still working and and hash it out. Maybe that becomes a warrant for repeal.”
Planning Board member David Ashmore said, “I agree with Rick completely. I think that's a great suggestion.”
Musson said, “We have talked about repealing and replacing it with something really different. But I still think you have a pretty good ordinance that works and it would be a lot more complicated, and that’s just my opinion.”
Mooers used the town’s confusing identification of driveways as an example. “Where’s the address? On this street, or another street, on a corner lot driveway?”
“We look at those kinds of issues, and we just kept adding a page and adding a page for clarification. Put in a footnote,” Mooers said.
“No, let's get rid of it. Rewrite it, so it makes sense.”
Code Enforcement Officer Kim Keene agreed. “We don’t have that.”
Musson asked, “Do we need it?”
“Well you do if you have a triangle lot with frontage on two streets,” Keene said. “This one requires a deeper setback than the other if it's public versus private roads.
“How do you take access? Okay, that's your front. Your rear now is to the highway. So you have a 25-foot setback because that's your rear setback versus the street, a public road setback, right?”
As the free-forming conversation continued, it became more apparent the town simply lacks the wherewithal to deal with fast emerging challenges like the housing crisis and even solar farms which can clear cut a forest as one recently did in Town Hill section of Bar Harbor.
But Musson, ever the cheerleader, was in a self-congratulatory mood. “One thing you guys can do here is pat yourself on the back and think about the stability that you've had as a community. And despite all the conversations we've had with short term rentals in the past year, I think there is a lot of trust that we're all trying to do mostly good things. So it's really helpful to have that. Whereas in Bar Harbor, I think that what they should do is spend a lot of trying to rebuild trust, rather than try to do anything new.”
As Musson was speaking Airdna.co was reporting 172 current vacation rentals in town, clustered mostly in the villages of Northeast Harbor, Somesville and Otter Creek. The town has no ordinance to regulate short-term rentals.
Bar Harbor is the only municipality on MDI with a strict moratorium on new vacation rentals. It is the only town with zoning to encourage dorm-like housing for seasonal workers.
Ironically Musson started the meeting proposing to copy Bar Harbor’s “shared accommodations” zones which was met with general agreement.
Except the LUZO committee failed in its only attempt so far to develop a meaningful short-term vacation rental policy without which a “shared accommodations” ordinance would be a nightmare because businesses would be free to rent their previous staff housing on Airbnb and VRBO.
Bar Harbor shut off that escape valve by forbidding transfer of vacation rental registrations. It has caps on two types of rentals - non-owner rentals with a minimum of four nights and owner-occupied rentals for two nights. On Sept. 5, Bar Harbor Planning Director Michele is scheduled to make a major recommendation on the next phase of attacking the housing crisis.
Where is the country’s toughest enforcement of short-term rentals? New York City
Thousands of New York City Airbnb listings are vanishing from the market.
The city will begin enforcing its Short-Term Rental Registration Law on Sept. 5, requiring short-term rental hosts to register with the Mayor's Office of Special Enforcement.
“It seems clear to me, based upon the current speed at which the city is processing applications for hosts, that a lot of supply will drop out of what's currently available,” said Sean Hennessey, clinical associate professor at the NYU School of Professional Studies Jonathan M. Tisch Center of Hospitality, as reported by USA TODAY.
Airbnb sued to have the law gutted, claiming it was effectively a ban on short-term rentals; a judge dismissed the lawsuit and the registration of units has moved at a snail-like pace, suggesting many units will become illegal soon.
The state, meanwhile, already has a ban on renting out units in most apartment buildings for fewer than 30 days without the full-time owner being present.
The new city law is aimed at cracking down on short-term rentals. It requires hosts to acknowledge and comply with regulations and forbids booking platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com from processing transactions for those that are unregistered.
“You cannot rent out an entire apartment or home to visitors for less than 30 days, even if you own or live in the building,” OSE said on its website. “This applies to all permanent residential buildings.”
Hosts can only offer short-term rentals if they remain with their guests in the apartment or unit. They are also prohibited from having more than two paying guests at a time, among other rules.
“There are penalties for both hosts and booking services who fail to comply with the requirements of the law,” OSE said.
The city received nearly 12,000 complaints regarding illegal short-term rentals from 2017 to 2021. Housing advocates have said listing whole apartments on the platforms deprives the city of supply.
Vocal supporter of workforce housing project is candidate for Mount Desert Planning Board
MOUNT DESERT - Former school committee chair Gail Marshall, a supporter of the workforce housing project in the village which has been met with stiff opposition by neighbors, is up for appointment to the Planning Board at the Sept. 5 select board meeting.
She would fill the remaining opening on the board. Allen Kimmerly, member of the Land-Use Ordinance Advisory Committee, began as an alternative member of the board this week.
In a commentary June 19 in the Islander, “Who gets to define a community?” Marshall wrote that, “The seasonal residents do not have to hire a lawyer to contest this project. It is a choice. They do not have to react with fear and suspicion. That is a choice. By making that choice, they risk turning this into an ‘us vs. them’ debate.
“We’d all be far better served if they tried to respect the very few remaining spaces for year-round residents, realizing they might have as much to gain in the bargain. We should not tolerate exclusionary economic redlining by zoning ordinance. Let the project continue through the Planning Board approval process without litigious interference.”
Marshall, a retired attorney, was witness to the sharp decline of enrollment at Mount Desert Elementary School in her years on the school committee.
“No one who lives here needs to be told that our communities are greatly imperiled by the extreme imbalance in our housing availability. We need far more housing for families who are not wealthy and want to live, work and contribute to the community year-round. We need many more nurses, ed techs, bus drivers, grocery clerks, plumbers, public safety workers, etc.”
Never let a good deed go unpunished: How Anne Napier pushed through harbormaster office project
SOUTHWEST HARBOR - The road to the new harbormaster’s office is paved with nit-picking and second guessing for a building the size of a one-car garage.
But Anne Napier is a force of nature and not easily intimidated. She learned how to hold her ground as a veteran member of the sharp-elbowed Harbor Committee. She held her ground this week and got what she needed to move the project ahead.
She was up against the revisionist views of select member Jim Vallette, who appeared willing to hold up the project beyond the fall construction season to get what he wanted - cedar siding and not vinyl.
He also asserted that the select board approved the project July 25 on the contingency that the plans would come back to the board for review.
Napier asserted that there never was such an agreement “especially since I had given the SB a detailed copy of the specs, drawings and costs.”
The timing was especially important because Napier expected final approval by the Planning Board Sept. 7, so work may begin on the water lines before a hard freeze. Otherwise, the work would be pushed well into next year.
Vallette stated, “In the late July SB meeting we broadly agreed to move forward. At the end of the discussion, I asked the Chair to clarify whether we would have a chance to review the contract before it was signed, and she assured that would happen. I have been preparing a comparison of vinyl to cedar options in advance of that being on the agenda. There’s a mill right near the shop in Unity that’s building the modular unit, Longfellow’s Cedar Shingles and Shakes, Windsor, ME.”
There was nothing broad or vague about member Natasha Johnson’s motion July 25, according to the recording of the meeting. “I’d like to make a motion to authorize the harbormaster and harbor committee to move forward with the harbormaster office project,” she said. The vote to approve was unanimous.
Napier has single-handedly nursed this project through the Harbor Committee, drafted the building plans herself and ushered it through the select board. This week select chair Carolyn Ball confirmed the project received full approval, although there might be an opportunity to revisit the siding issue as that is the final step in construction.
How would a single-egress MDI evacuate the island in an emergency?
MOUNT DESERT - What if the island had to be evacuated in the event of an extreme weather event or a fast-moving wildfire?
There is only one egress which has earned its own dubious reputation, like when billionaire Charlie Butt caused a 10-hour traffic jam by transporting a 20-foot apple tree from Ellsworth to his estate in Northeast Harbor 20 years ago. That wide cargo took up both lanes of traffic and the height forced power lines to have to be lifted.
Or 10 years ago, when Rt. 3 was closed for seven hours in Trenton after a propane-fueled Islander bus was struck by a pickup truck.
Things have only gotten worse.
Only three weeks ago an RVs slid off Rt. 3 in Trenton during the late afternoon commuter hour. Chris Popper of WDEA was caught in that and wrote this account.
Even in normal times, the northbound afternoon traffic is now regularly clocking at more than an hour from Bar Harbor to the Walmart in Ellsworth.
Now imagine a wildfire which engulfs much of northern MDI including Routes 3 and 102 and is on its way to incinerate the rest of the island much the same way Bar Harbor was destroyed in 1947.
Andrew Sankey is paid to worry about such matters as the Hancock County emergency management director. He was on his way to Prospect Harbor to oversee an “active shooter” orientation at a school Thursday when he returned a call from the QSJ after readers sought information about what authorities here have planned for any unexpected emergencies.
First and foremost, Sankey said, they would borrow ideas from parts of the country which has had significant experience with evacuations.
“We would manage it the exact same way that the Florida Keys do. Traffic to the island would be halted. And if we really had that dire situation where we had to evacuate MDI, we would use all lanes of traffic for egress to get folks safely off the island.”
Sankey is like the insurance actuary assessing the risk of every potential likelihood, but he has to moderate himself so as not to be drinking from a hose of possibilities.
“In the panic of an evacuation, where people are being forced to drive, exit the island, from the inbound lanes that they are unaccustomed to, unless they've lived in England or Japan. The potential for an incident happening then is increased with a road closure at the worst possible time.
“So that's all sort of the thought and planning without getting overly dramatic or embellishing any of this. You can plan yourself into paralysis where you want to be so ahead of this stuff that you're effective in absolutely nothing when it happens.
“So, there's a double edge to this and you want to make sure that you've thought about it and you've planned or prepared for it, but at the same time, you need to be functional and realistic.”
Still, the weather events and the natural disasters over the just the last two years have added to the anxiety. Who would have thought a hurricane would strike Southern California or a wildfire would engulf half of Maui?
The history of MDI is an indicator of likely repeatable events. Once it’s happened - like the 1947 fire which destroyed Bar Harbor - it’s a cautionary tale.
In 1926, a “tidal wave” destroyed much of Bass Harbor and many boats. It made the front page of the New York Times on Jan. 10, 1926.
Today, we have a vernacular for such events - “rogue waves” - which was the appellation attached to a similar event in 2008 in Boothbay, Southport and Bristol, when on Oct. 28, in a matter of minutes around 3 p.m., a wave of enormous proportion appeared and destroyed much of those seaports.
"The cause of it is a mystery," said National Weather Service meteorologist John Jensenius, who first reported the waves from a field office in Gray, Maine. "But it's not mysterious that it happened."
A century ago there was little of the meteorological science which is pervasive today. Stankey pointed to the possibility of a tsunami originating from the islands off the western shores of Africa - the Azores and Canary Islands - and its potential for large scale destruction for the shoreline on MDI.
He worries that a relatively hurricane-free region like Maine would suddenly be susceptible to violent storms like the one which struck Nova Scotia last year. He worries about timing - weather events with plenty of warning like hurricanes versus those which are more unpredictable like wildfires.
But citizens need to be vigilant, Sankey said, and become educated. He urged we all consult the website Ready.gov for preparedness for storms, fire, flooding, extreme heat and steps to take after disaster strikes.
Dear readers,
Here's the full comment I made to Lincoln, which was edited in the above posting.
"When I started as a member of the Select Board, last Summer, I volunteered to be the liaison the harbor committee and recommended that the replacement of the harbormaster building be a top priority of the town for the year. The Board placed it at the top of the priority list and thanks to the good work of the committee, Nick, and especially Anne Napier and new harbormaster, Jarrod, it is about to happen.
"In the late July SB meeting we broadly agreed to move forward. At the end of the discussion, I asked the Chair to clarify whether we would have a chance to review the contract before it was signed, and she assured that would happen. I have been preparing a comparison of vinyl to cedar options in advance of that being on the agenda. Preview: there’s a mill right near the shop in Unity that’s building the modular unit. Longfellow’s Cedar Shingles and Shakes, Windsor, ME
https://longfellowscedarshingles.com/"
"The contract was not on the agenda for this week. It only came up at the end of the meeting when discussing items for the next agenda, and I believe we will have the chance to discuss these final details then."
I hope this provides the full context of my thinking and great respect for what Anne has accomplished. Please know that the harbormaster office project is long overdue (decades), and that my request to review the siding – one of the last things to be done in construction - should not impact the ability to get this done this season.
Nothing is free including renewable power; wind and solar. These renewable sources are unreliable compared to base load natural gas plants. The move to renewable is why the costs of power are rising so fast in Maine and the rest of the country.