On March 24, 2010 By unanimous vote, the Maine Legislature's Utilities and Energy Committee sent a final version of LD 1810."An Act To Implement the Recommendations of the Governor's Ocean Energy Task Force", to the floor where it is expected to pass without difficulty and be signed by Governor Baldacci.
The bill prohibits windfarming in state waters and directs would-be ocean windmill investors to join in an effort to build floating offshore wind turbines in Maine and then tow them ten miles and further from shore for deployment in federal and EEZ waters.
The decision to refrain from windfarming in state waters came after intense opposition from lobsterimen, groundfishermen, scallopers and shrimpers, objecting to the threatened leasing away of their irreplaceable commercial fishing grounds to absentee power utilities.
The bill also proposes that the state market deep offshore wind as a special kind of "green ocean energy" that doesn't harm scenery and property values like land-based wind farms do in Maine.
The writer for the Kennebec Journal & Portland Press Herald, E
than Wilensky-Lanford,
made only the barest passing reference to the former and focused instead on the latter: the state wanting to persuade Maine business and academia to buy higher priced power that the offshore wind farm would generate
The rather astonishing victory by fishermen, windjammers and other coastal interests in preventing the closing of the state's marine commons is almost dismissed by
Wilensky-Lanford's article. In hi article Panel backs near-shore wind, tide power bill
he wrote: "The bill set short-term goals of developing near-shore wind power, but now is more focused on deep-water projects.
"
Such understatement! the reader cannot tell from this article that there will be no windfarming in Maine state waters,. Can they?