All islands are different, but have a lot in common. That is one of the mantras we repeat all the time at the Island Institute, and was a theme of a conference week and a half ago, when over 50 islanders from around New England gathered in in person and via video links to discuss their communities’ energy challenges.
Islands are laboratories of innovation because all island communities face a variety of daunting challenges as a result of their geographic isolation. Everything islanders use or consume, except local fish and shellfish, costs money to bring onto an island and that fact tends to focus the mind on ways to use less of everything in order to conserve dollars. Because the two most expensive imports to New England’s islands are food and energy, anything islanders can do to reduce those costs, especially the cost of energy, will help sustain fragile island economies.
Some Maine islands—call them the lucky ones—are close enough to shore to be part of the nearest mainland grid. The five island communities in Casco Bay, along with Islesboro in the Midcoast and the Cranberry Isles off of Mount Desert fall into this category. But the rest of New England’s islands, from Block Island off Rhode Island, to the Elizabeth Islands of Massachusetts—Naushon and Cuttyhunk—and New Hampshire’s Star Island, as well as for seven other Maine island communities must fend for themselves when it comes to providing electricity for their communities.
The most remote islands have it the worst because there has never been an economically viable means of plugging into the mainland via a cooperatively financed submarine cable. Islanders on Vinalhaven, North Haven, Isle au Haut, Swan’s, Frenchboro, Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard are all connected via underwater cables to the mainland grid that there local power companies bought and are paying for. That leaves New England’s other electric companies on the islands of Matinicus, Monhegan, Star Island, the Cape Islands and Block Island to rely on diesel generators to supply power to their residents and businesses.
During most of the past half century, the cost of diesel fuel was modest enough in the great scheme of things for islanders to be able to absorb the cost of transporting fuel to their communities and then burning it in generating plants to supply the community with electricity. But that era has now emphatically past. The electric rates on some these true “energy islands” is now from four to seven times higher than the cost of power on the mainland. When the economy was booming, the profit margins in lobster, construction and tourism businesses were enough to absorb the high cost of energy. But those days are over and islanders are considering a variety of strategies to create more a more sustainable energy future.
Without a doubt, the most forward looking energy program among the 13 island communities represented at the conference was the response of the Fox Islands Electric Cooperative in building three wind turbines that create enough electricity to make the communities of North Haven and Vinalhaven energy independent on annual basis. That is, the wind turbines produce as much electricity on an annual basis as the two consume in a year. Most people are familiar with the noise controversy that has also swirled around the island community, state regulatory agencies and more recently the courts. Nevertheless, the turbines remain a strong point of pride to a very large majority of islanders, as the conferees that visited the turbines learned. One of the ironies of the noisy controversy is that the nighttime “quiet location” noise standards have been lowered by three decibels for wind turbines, while noise standards for diesel generators can be three decibels louder. So much for lowering the carbon footprint.
Several of the New England’s diesel-electric islands are actively considering integrating additional forms of alternative energy into their “islanded” grids. Both solar and wind diesel hybrid systems are being considered, meaning integrating either solar photo-voltaics or wind turbines into the local electric system. Because neither the sun shines nor the wind blows all of the time, the diesel generators will still be necessary, just less so. For New England’s islands during the past half decade, generating electricity from solar panels has been prohibitively expensive without some deep pockets to subsidize the high upfront costs. But lately, advances in the technology and tremendous international competition has driven down the cost of solar panels to the point that it makes economic sense for places like Star Island in New Hampshire and Naushon Island in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts. There is even a new company, ReVision Energy, which specializes in raising attractive financing packages to communities and non-profits that want to invest in solar panel installations.
On the subject of offshore wind, which islanders from Monhegan, Martha’s Vineyard and Block Island discussed during one panel, the consensus appears to be that the current price of natural gas, which has fallen by 300 percent during the past five years courtesy of the hydro-fracking boom, will make the development of offshore wind financially unattractive. The possible exception to this in the long-term could be the Statoil proposal to develop a pilot project in the Gulf of Maine based on floating platform technology the company has pioneered in their North Sea oil drilling operations. The great attraction of floating wind platforms from an economic perspective is they can be built more cheaply because they can be assembled onshore without the hugely expensive specialized barges required for fixed bottom turbines. Also they can be deployed in much deeper water, where the wind blows harder and more consistently. Maine’s Public Utilities Commission, however, took a dim view of investing Maine ratepayers dollars to finance the research and development costs of the first four-turbine pilot project.
Although renewable energy projects across America are being scaled back in the face of political uncertainty over the federal commitment to support the expansion of these industries, islands remain on the cutting edge of innovation because bringing down the cost of rates from 60 cents to a dollar per kilowatt-hour is incentive enough to try new approaches.
Philip Conkling is president and founder of the Island Institute based in Rockland, Maine.