Maine's Fox Islands a Clean Energy Lab for "Island Earth"

By Alvin Powell

On an island 15 miles off of Maine’s rocky coast, three wind turbines turn, transforming a natural element of the island landscape into clean energy.

Islanders long ago harnessed the wind, relying on it to move their boats to and from fishing grounds. Today, the wind not only powers the pleasure craft that ply scenic Penobscot Bay each summer, it lights their houses at night and, in winter even makes heat to ward off the season’s chill.

The windmills provide power to more than 1,500 residents on the islands of Vinalhaven and North Haven, and in so doing confront many of the issues facing the wind industry nationwide as it grows from a mere curiosity into a significant player in the country’s energy scheme. Among those issues are environmental sustainability, reliability, cost, and community acceptance.

The project so enthralled its primary driver, George Baker, that the Harvard Business School professor gave up his prestigious tenured position to see it through. Today, the project is used as a teaching tool in one of the School’s famed cases, and is part of an undergraduate seminar taught by Baker on the public policy, economics, and technology of renewable energy.

The Vinalhaven windmills have come online at a time of rapid growth for the wind industry in the United States. That growth received further impetus in January, when President Barack Obama called for a transformation of the country’s energy infrastructure. In 25 years, he told the nation, 80 percent of U.S. electricity would be generated by clean sources. Obama didn’t specify how that would be done, mentioning renewable sources along with nuclear, clean coal, and natural gas, but it seems inevitable that wind power will become a larger part of the nation’s energy mix.

Wind can hardly go anywhere but up. Recent statistics show wind power makes up just 1.1 percent of U.S. electricity generating capacity, while 70 percent is provided by coal and natural gas. The numbers also reveal an industry that is growing rapidly. Of the nation’s 40,180 megawatts of wind power installed by the end of 2010, 5,115 megawatts had been installed in 2010 alone and another 5,600 megawatts were under construction in early 2011. The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), a wind industry trade group, says that the installed capacity is just a fraction of the country’s wind power potential. AWEA statistics show that there are 10.4 million megawatts of potential wind resources on land and another 4.2 million megawatts offshore.

The roots of Vinalhaven’s wind story stretch back several decades and lie in the roar of diesel generators, on the seabed where a power cable lies, and in the islanders’ pocketbooks.

The electricity supply on Vinalhaven and North Haven—together called the Fox Islands—has always been temperamental. Residents have struggled with high energy prices and unreliable supply. For many years, power on the island was supplied by a large diesel generator that ran all day and night. In the 1970s, the diesel generator was supplanted by a cable to the mainland laid on the sea floor. The cable was an improvement, quieter and less smelly, except when snagged by fishing gear, which knocked the power out.

“It was not uncommon to go a couple of days without power, a dragger would hit it or something would go wrong,” says Adam Lachman, an island businessman and member of the Island Energy Task Force, a group of island residents interested in energy issues.The cable finally broke for good in 2005, forcing the local electric company—a cooperative whose members are the islands’ ratepayers—to borrow heavily to install another, buried in the seafloor this time. 

"There's no such thing as zero impact. We have to look at alternatives and choose. If we make a rule that we can't do anything that has an impact, we'll just sit quietly and cook over the next 50 years."

Lachman says that a spike in utility rates after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in 2005 really got people’s attention. Island residents had already been paying rates nearly triple those on the mainland, and concerns about the sustainability of island life were widespread. In fact, the decline of year-round island communities off Maine’s Coast—from 300 to 15 during the last 100 years—was a statewide concern and prompted the creation of the Rockland-based Island Institute in 1983, to provide technical assistance on issues important to island communities.

To some island residents, the post-Katrina spike in energy costs was just another sign that they were being priced off the island where their families had lived for generations, an omen that the expense of running their lobster boats, lighting their stores, restaurants, and inns would be that much higher. For others, it was further evidence that something had to be done to make island living sustainable.

“My family has been here since Vinalhaven was named,” says Kris Davidson, a lifelong islander who runs a real estate business there. She says she understands it “when people like me can’t afford to live here because of the cost.”

Though the high price of electricity was an important driver for the Fox Islands’ wind project, several of those involved say their concern for the environment also played a role. William Alcorn ’58, who owns the 71 acres on which the turbines are located, has been visiting the islands since the 1960s, spending years as a “summer jerk” before moving there full time. Alcorn says living on an island has given him a perspective about limited resources that mainland dwellers might not have. His house, he says, has solar panels, and he burns wood as a renewable source of heat.

“I was a summer jerk, now I’m a winter jerk and I live here year round,” says Alcorn. “I’m a big supporter of renewable energy. We’ve got to get off oil.” 

So, even as the high pressure hoses were digging a seafloor trench for the new power cable to the mainland, conversations were underway about the possibility of installing wind turbines on Vinalhaven. Islanders understood that the one thing that didn’t have to be shipped there at extra cost is wind.

In fact, work toward a wind turbine had already begun. In 2001, the University of Massachusetts conducted a two-year study of wind speeds on the island, concluding that Vinalhaven’s winds would drive a turbine.

In the spring of 2007, North Haven resident Hanna Pingree, a state lawmaker and speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, called a meeting of two electric cooperatives that she knew were thinking about wind power. The Fox Islands Electric Cooperative provided electricity on Vinalhaven and North Haven, while the Swan’s Island Electric Cooperative provided power to Swan’s Island, about 30 miles to the north, and to nearby Frenchboro.

Among the other board members at the meeting was the Swan’s Island Co-op treasurer, George Baker, who had a home on Frenchboro.

Baker, now a faculty associate of the Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE), recalls being intrigued by the presentations at the meeting. He was particularly impressed with the Fox Islands presentation. They were much farther along than Swan’s Island and had had several community meetings, as well as the UMass study of wind resources. They had even identified a potential site.

It was clear that a lot of work needed to be done before anyone could know if the project was feasible, but Baker had a sabbatical coming up. He offered to take on the task if the Island Institute, based on the mainland in Rockland, would provide him with administrative support.

The Island Institute agreed, so Baker moved to Rockland and set to work. “He spent two months looking at the data very carefully and said the first thing you learn in business school is that there are no $20 bills lying on the ground, because if there was a $20 bill lying on the ground, someone would pick it up,” says Philip Conckling, Island Institute president. In this case there was, “it just took a lot of effort to bend down and pick it up.”

From reviewing the data, Baker learned two critical things that pushed the project from an idea to a reality, Conckling says. Though wind power is typically not competitive with coal or natural gas fired power plants, because the islanders paid such high rates already—29 cents per kilowatt hour—Baker figured out that turbines would actually reduce islanders’ electric rates.

Second, he showed that by using tax incentives to lower the cost of borrowing, it was feasible for the community electric cooperative to do the project itself; it wouldn’t need to bring in a private developer to build, own, and run the windmills. Baker knew that island communities are tightly knit, friendly to other islanders and wary of outsiders, particularly outsiders there to make a buck.

“Those were two big revelations for the islanders, because they were pretty sure they had a viable wind resource, but thought they would have to invite in a developer to access that,” Conckling says. “That the islanders could actually…develop a community energy plan financed by themselves in significant measure, that was a major step forward.”

Baker, 53, had worked as an organizational economist for 22 years and had achieved some measure of success during his career at Harvard Business School. After being hired as an assistant professor in 1986, he had not only gained tenure, he had also been awarded a prestigious position as Krannert Professor of Business Administration. He had also become an expert in the design of compensation systems and in how incentives affect organizational performance.

To Baker, the project was a chance to spend his sabbatical outside the world of academia, applying his skills to investigate a project with practical applications, one with implications for his own island community on Frenchboro, which was also considering wind power at the time. 

“My primary motivation was not an intellectual exercise, but a practical exercise,” Baker recalls. “All my academic colleagues expected me to turn it into research, because that’s what academics do. Instead, I’m turning it into gigantic machines on an island in Maine.”

By the time Baker’s sabbatical was up, he realized the project was not only possible, but that it would be beneficial, lowering electric rates on the islands in a sustainable way. He took another leave to work on it, becoming vice president of community wind at the Island Institute. From his experience on Frenchboro, Baker knew that the project needed substantial support from the community, which grew through a series of public meetings. By August 2008, the Fox Islands Electric Co-op felt ready to have a vote. It polled co-op members, the ratepayers. Since it was the only electric company on the island, that meant it polled virtually the entire population of Vinalhaven and North Haven.

The project passed overwhelmingly, 382-5, a 98 percent majority and margin so high that project supporters still point to it with pride. “Someone said you couldn’t get a 98 percent vote on the American flag out here,” Conckling says. 

The project soon kicked into high gear. In the months after the vote, Baker and Conckling worked furiously to get the detailed planning in place, engineering studies, construction planning, and, of course financing.

The financing proved to be unique, Baker says. Because the Fox Islands Electric Co-op had borrowed years earlier to pay for the new electric cable to the mainland, its debt was too high to qualify for conventional financing, so Baker had to find other ways.

Because the project was too small to attract attention from large corporations looking for tax credits that the government provides to wind projects, Baker looked locally. He found Diversified Communications, a Portland-based media company, which committed $4.3 million, an amount later increased to $5 million, in exchange for the windmills’ tax credits for production. As a nonprofit, the Fox Islands Electric Co-op was not taxable, so couldn’t avail itself of the credits. So the Co-op created a for-profit entity, Fox Islands Wind, headed by Baker, to operate the windmills and sell the tax credits.

For the balance of the project’s $14.5 million cost, Baker applied for a loan from the U.S. government’s Rural Utilities Service, which provided $9 million at just 3 ½ percent interest.

With financing in place, they had to find windmills to buy. But because of the wind-farm building boom, there was a three year waiting list for turbines. Baker talked to turbine manufacturer General Electric, which, because of the community-supported nature of the project and its small size, agreed to get them turbines within a few months, rather than years.

The project had been sized to match the island. It is a 4.5 megawatt facility, made up of three 1.5 megawatt turbines, which generate about the same power that the community uses in a year. Though some islanders dreamed of energy self-sufficiency, the power cable to the mainland remains a key feature. Wind power is generated when the wind blows. That doesn’t necessarily coincide with peak power demand. Turbines generate the most power during the stormy winter months when the fewest people are on the island. Generation is lower in the placid summer months, when the islands’ population surges, along with electricity consumption.

The undersea power cable to the mainland allows the co-op to sell surplus power during the winter and buy additional power during the summer.

Construction began in the summer of 2009, the only time of year that wind speeds on the island are low enough to erect turbines. The towers were shipped in from Quebec, the blades from Brazil and the generators from Florida, says Conckling. The crane to erect the towers was so big that it came on 18 trucks, shipped from the mainland in nine barge loads.

Getting to the island wasn’t the only difficult part. With just one narrow north-south road, the trucks carrying enormous turbine parts clogged traffic during the construction period. On one occasion, a truck tire slipped off the road. Luckily, the windmill part wasn’t damaged, but it was clearly going to take some doing to get the truck back on the road. On both sides, traffic began to back up.

After a short time, Conckling says, islanders began walking past the truck, carrying parcels and packages. In a community where islanders trust their neighbors enough to regularly leave their keys in the car, they were swapping vehicles to get around the jam.

That community spirit was in evidence at a celebration and official ribbon cutting on the first of December 2009, when the windmills were switched on. The project was in operation, sending electricity to the islands’ homes and to the mainland over the cable.

In their first year of operation, the windmills generated about 4 percent more power than expected. Electric costs for island residents have come down by about 5 cents a kilowatt hour, Baker reports. Some unexpected expenses related to noise complaints by neighbors have eaten into the savings, says Baker, but some residents have nevertheless saved hundreds of dollars a year. According to the Island Institute’s Conckling, across both islands, savings due to the windmills after the first year totaled $350,000, after all the costs and loan payments.

The Fox Islands’ electric system wasn’t the only thing remade during the development process. Baker himself is in a different place professionally. When his first six-month leave ran out, he tried to return to his tenured post at Harvard Business School, but found himself stretched too thin, trying to be in two places at once and sleeping just a few hours a night. Six months later, he took a yearlong leave and, finally, last summer, gave up his tenured position and accepted a part-time role as a senior lecturer of business administration and a HUCE faculty associate.

Despite giving up a position that many academics would consider the pinnacle of their career, Baker seems at ease with where he is professionally. He’s excited by the real-world problems he’s grappling with on Vinalhaven and through his work with VCharge, an energy-related startup. He’s also excited about his new teaching duties.

As a part-time faculty member, Baker is teaching just one class, but it’s near and dear to his heart. The undergraduate seminar, The Technology, Economics and Public Policy of Renewable Energy, is about the practical considerations facing renewable energy in this country, allowing Baker to draw on his experience on Vinalhaven and pushing him to learn more about other technologies. Baker jokes that for some lessons, he’s just a step ahead of his students.

Baker employs the Business School’s case-method teaching style for the class’ two-dozen undergraduates, presenting situations and problems and then eliciting responses through a broad-ranging classroom discussion. One April class dealt with Fox Islands Wind, the potential for a similar installment on Monhegan Island, and plans for a pumped hydroelectric facility on a Maine riverbank, where plans include digging an enormous underground cavern, letting water flow down to generate power during the day when prices are high and pumping it back up to the surface again at night when prices are low.

Throughout that session’s two and a half hours, Baker demonstrates the clarity and public speaking skills that were so useful in laying out the Fox Islands’ wind case to the islanders. Baker presented facts and drew students into the discussion, offered counterarguments, and then, when the subject was fully mined, moved the discussion to the next topic.

For sophomore Ryan Heffrin, interested in a career in renewable energy, the class covers issues she’d like to be more involved with when she graduates. That sentiment was echoed by Louis Amira, who, as a senior preparing for a job in energy consulting, is a bit closer to that reality. For Amira, the class provided a break from the theories often taught in other classes and a glimpse of the real world waiting after graduation, where renewable energy offers a path toward a healthier environment.

“I find it difficult to believe the solution [to global environmental problems] doesn’t in some way hinge on renewable energy,” Amira says.

Though Baker’s recent career trajectory could belong to someone going through an environmental awakening, when asked whether he’s an environmentalist, Baker grimaces. He’s concerned about environmental problems, he says, but doesn’t think solutions should be achieved at all costs. To him, solutions to the world’s environmental problems have to make economic sense—not just because he loves economics—but because if they don’t, they won’t be widely adopted and their impact will be minimal.

On the Fox Islands, no one would accuse the Vinalhaven windmills of having minimal impact. The turbines have made many residents happy with their savings and with the idea that they’re helping fight climate change. That happiness is not universal, however. A handful of island residents say the turbines are unexpectedly loud and disrupt their lives at home. They have formed a group pushing for Fox Islands Wind to reduce the noise by slowing the windmills at night.

Art Lindgren, a member of the Fox Islands Wind Neighbors, says he can’t sleep and his property value has fallen. He puts the blame squarely on Baker, accusing him of poor project planning, deceptive practices, and making the unhappy neighbors a target of other islanders’ anger.

The group has attracted media attention and filed complaints with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, which last fall agreed that the windmills were out of compliance with the state’s 45 decibel sound limit, falling a few decibels over that limit on several occasions. The Maine DEP, however, also asked Lindgren to stop his repeated complaints, according to Lindgren.

When asked about the sound issue, Baker responds carefully. He points out that those upset with the windmills are a small minority–10 or 15 people–and not necessarily those living closest to the windmill site. A May 2010 survey of Co-op members seems to bear out that contention. The survey, conducted by the Fox Islands Electric Co-op, showed that 95 percent of respondents remained supportive of the project. Even so, some of the comments made on the survey indicated that the disagreement over noise has strained the close-knit community, with some saying that accommodation should be made for those upset, while others cheered the wind installation, saying those who don’t like it could pack up and leave.

Several supporters of the wind project say it’s unfortunate that media coverage of the windmills has focused on the dispute, coloring how it’s perceived by the off-island public. “It’s sort of taken the bloom off the rose,” Alcorn says.

Though clearly frustrated by the issue, Baker says it’s important to take the complaints of the neighbors seriously, something echoed by other supporters of the project. Fox Islands Wind is conducting studies to characterize the nature of the complaints. Baker says he’d rather not take blanket actions like slowing the windmills every night, which would seriously affect the power generated and savings available to ratepayers. Instead, Baker is convinced that a more targeted solution is possible, one that would allow the turbines to be slowed at particular times of the day or week or in particular wind conditions that result in the greatest annoyance.

Baker disputes the Maine DEP’s findings that the windmills were out of compliance, saying Fox Islands Wind’s own studies show that is not the case. He believes that ambient noise, such as the wind in the trees, confounded the Maine DEP readings, since they can’t measure windmill sound by the standard practice of measuring on a quiet day with little ambient sound, since the blades wouldn’t be turning then. Since the amount by which they were found to be out of compliance is two decibels, on the threshold of human hearing, quieting the windmills by that amount wouldn’t provide much relief, Baker says.

“What’s going on is these things make a little bit of sound, they just do,” Baker says. “Some people feel bothered by it…We’ve been working with the National Renewable Energy Lab not to worry about decibels, but to figure out when people are bothered by it and what it is about the sound that bothers people and see if there’s something we could do with targeted curtailment during times when it’s most bothersome.” 

Baker has addressed the noise issue with his students as well, telling them that those complaining today are not people who had been out to kill the project all along. Instead, they had been among its supporters but found something about the noise deeply objectionable. Those residents feel as if they were misled about the noise issue and, though Baker doesn’t feel anyone was misled, he says if he had to do it again, he’d handle the noise issue differently.

"The wind's variability is problematic because today's power grid has no way to store energy. We need something to back up [wind] when nothing's blowing," Hogan says. "If you have natural gas or coal plants, usually both won't go down at once."

If there’s a lesson to be learned, says Baker, it’s that every energy source has an impact.

Though the islanders enjoyed quiet energy from the cable for many years, that power was generated somewhere, by nearby coal or nuclear plants, and those plants have a cost, hidden to islanders when they flip a switch.

“There’s no such thing as zero impact. We have to look at alternatives and choose,” Baker says. “If we make a rule that we can’t do anything that has an impact, we won’t do anything. We’ll sit and quietly cook over the next 50 years.”

Under Obama’s leadership, the U.S. appears set to do something to clean its electricity supply. William Hogan, Plank Professor of Global Energy Policy in the Kennedy School of Government and research director of the Harvard Electricity Policy Group, says wind’s low cost compared to other renewables makes it the most viable candidate for clean energy growth.

“It’s a relatively small portion of the energy mix now, but it has two appealing characteristics. It’s been growing rapidly and it’s probably the cheapest renewable energy technology for generating electricity,” says Hogan, a faculty associate of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. “When people talk about expanding renewables, they’re often talking about wind.”

Hogan, whose Kennedy School office features a two-foot wire model of a transmission tower and whose tables are scattered with energy books, cautions, however, that calling wind cheaper than other renewables, doesn’t mean it’s cheap. Without government subsidies, onshore wind is 20 to 50 percent more expensive than fossil fuels and offshore wind, which puts towers in the ocean and so has the added cost of construction and operation in a hostile environment, is two to three times more expensive than fossil fuels. “Costs are coming down rapidly,” he says, “but we’re not in a situation where wind is competitive on its own.”

Government subsidies currently take the form of tax credits. One is a production tax credit, given for each kilowatt hour of wind power generated. The second is for renewable energy, a tradable credit that can be purchased by organizations required by state law to add some green to their energy mix. The subsidies do bring down costs, but wind power advocates have had to contend with the same kind of capriciousness from the federal government as have supporters of other environmental issues. The environment remains one of several issues in the crucible of America’s culture war and a focal point of political strife. Clean energy has been linked to the battle over climate change and portrayed as being at odds with those whose energy policy mantra is as simple as ‘drill, baby drill.’

What that means is that the tax credits, approved on an annual basis, have been allowed to lapse several times, creating an uncertain environment for planners of wind projects. “You’d like to have a more stable environment, but this is the U.S.,” Hogan says dryly.

While some are critical of the wind industry’s reliance on subsidies to bring their cost down, wind advocates say the subsidy argument cuts both ways. AWEA says that every energy technology is supported by government incentives, including fossil fuels, citing a U.S. Government Accountability Office report that says that between the 2002 and 2007 fiscal years, fossil fuels received $13.7 billion in government incentives compared with just $2.8 billion for renewables.

Hogan is skeptical that large-scale transformation of the U.S. energy system is possible without a tax on carbon emissions. Still, he believes that technology could provide opportunities for cost-saving innovations. “There are still significant opportunities and the potential for technological improvement,” Hogan says. “We know more than nothing, but there’s a lot left to learn.”

Besides high costs, a transition to large-scale wind power presents two hurdles. Foremost is location. The wind blows hardest in places where there aren’t necessarily a lot of people. That implies running new transmission lines to get the power from the windy hinterlands to the cities where it’s needed. Hogan says the cost of the transmission lines aren’t the biggest hurdle: it’s figuring out who has to pay for them that’s difficult. Federal courts have already ruled that costs can’t just be spread across all ratepayers, they have to be borne by those who benefit from the lines. The problem, Hogan says, is figuring out who those people are.

Another serious problem is intermittency. The wind blows and then stops on its own schedule, and though wind-power developers pick sites known to be windier, the power supply fluctuates.

The wind’s variability is problematic because today’s power grid has no way to store energy. That means it has no place to put extra energy supplied by wind farms on a windy day and no place to get additional energy when wind turbines slow on a calm day. Today’s power plant operators match electricity generation to usage, or load, which rises and falls predictably by time of day and season. Demand is low early in the morning, for example, and rises on hot summer days when air conditioners are running across an entire region.

One of the benefits of fossil fuel plants are they can run round the clock for weeks at a time. When one comes offline, other plants can be fired up to meet the load on the system. It’s rare, Hogan says, for all the coal and natural gas plants to be offline at once. That’s not the case with wind.

“We need something to back up [wind] when nothing’s blowing,” Hogan says. “If you have natural gas or coal plants, usually both won’t go down at the same time.”

The intermittency problem isn’t yet much of a factor in the push to increase wind production. Wind power makes up such a small part of the total U.S. electricity generation, explains Hogan, that the intermittency is washed out in the grid’s normal operating fluctuations. As wind becomes a larger part of the national energy mix, however, the problem will need to be dealt with, he says.

From a cost standpoint, Hogan says the Fox Islands wind project provides an interesting niche situation, where wind power makes economic as well as environmental sense. While there may be similar niche markets around the United States, where wind is competitive because the cost of fossil-fuel generated electricity is initially high due to local conditions, he isn’t sure there are lessons applicable to the broader market related to cost. Another aspect of the project, however, may offer broader lessons.

“The interesting thing about that project is not the wind, but the bricks,” says Hogan, referring to the islanders’ unusual approach to the intermittency problem.

The high-density ceramic bricks Hogan refers to were part of a pilot project during the winter and spring of 2010 designed to turn the intermittency of wind from a disadvantage to an advantage.

The island’s energy issues reflect those of the broader country, Conckling explains. While electricity is a significant portion of the energy used, even more goes to transportation and heating of homes and buildings, each of which account for 40 percent of overall energy consumption. On a windy island off the Maine coast, heating costs are not only considerable, they’re incurred for much of the year.

In the winter, when the turbines are turning out more electricity than the islanders need, it gets sold back to the New England grid at wholesale prices of just 4 or 5 cents a kilowatt hour. At the same time, heating homes and businesses is done with oil barged from the mainland at a 30 percent premium, roughly $3.10 a gallon.

That got Baker thinking: what if they used the extra power generated by the turbine to offset heating costs for islanders? Wouldn’t that be preferable to selling it to the mainland at just a few cents per kilowatt hour?

Baker figured that the equivalent of heating one’s home with $3.10 oil would be electricity at 10 cents per kilowatt hour. He knew that the price of electricity fluctuates daily, with prices dropping significantly when demand falls, as it does during the wee hours of the morning.

Baker contacted a company that sold a heater based on an old technology, one that was devised in World War II Germany for a similar purpose: to help cope with intermittent power due to war-related outages. The concept is simple. The bricks form a solid mass that can be heated electrically, through heating elements like the burners on an electric stove, and then slowly releases the heat over hours and days. Six units were installed as a test in four businesses and two homes to be used as supplemental heat.

The key to the whole experiment was not just the brick storage units, but the modern controls that went with them. The control unit monitored the electric grid and, when it saw that the islands were selling electricity to the mainland inexpensively, it turned on the heating units, converting cheap electricity to heat. Able to store heat for several days, the heating units were mainly used for supplemental space heating, with a blower fan to move air over the bricks and into the room.

The units were centrally controlled by the Co-op, which only turned them on when prices fell to the point that they could charge customers a few cents more than the wholesale price the Co-op would have gotten from the mainland and a few cents less than the 10 cent per kilowatt hour equivalent price customers would have paid for heating their home with oil.

“It was a giant win-win,” Baker says.

Kris Davidson had one of the heating units in her real estate office and says it was efficient, quiet, and worked well as a supplement to her kerosene heating system for the three months the test unit was there. “Even if we were to lose power in a snowstorm, I loved the idea that the bricks retained their heat,” says Davidson.

Electricity is generally considered by environmentalists a poor choice for heating because power plants are relatively inefficient at generating electricity (about 55 percent efficient), while individual home furnaces burning oil or natural gas are much more efficient—80 to 95 percent. When coupled with wind power, though, systems like those piloted on Vinalhaven, called thermal energy storage systems, have the potential to turn electricity into a green and potentially economical choice even as they help solve wind’s intermittency problem.

The islands are looking for other ways to take advantage of Vinalhaven's surplus power. "Now that we have a $14.5 million dollar project, how do we take another step in innovating? I think what the Fox Islands have done is major, it's a big step for an island community to show what's possible elsewhere.

“Electric heat has a justifiably terrible reputation among environmentalists,” Baker says. “But if you’re using wind power,” it can be an efficient way to capture excess capacity.

The thermal energy storage unit acts like a giant battery, storing energy generated by wind turbines as heat and releasing it slowly over 24 to 36 hours.

“Unless the wind stops blowing for three days, you won’t run out of heat,” Baker says. “The problem for renewables in general—solar and wind—is that you don’t get energy when you want it, you get it when God wants to give it to you. That’s not the way the grid works.”

Baker is president and chief financial officer of the startup called VCharge that makes the complex controls that monitor electric prices on the grid and ensure that cheap power is used to heat the thermal storage units. The company is expanding the idea beyond Vinalhaven and beyond wind. Charging heaters in the middle of the night when rates are low works whether the power comes from wind, coal, gas or solar.

VCharge and Baker have begun a trial with the town energy company in Concord, Mass., where they have installed heating units in nine homes. Unlike the Vinalhaven experiment, however, the Concord program doesn’t use the thermal energy storage units for supplemental heat, but to replace central heat.

Baker is looking for broader applications beyond both Vinalhaven and Concord. One place that seems a good candidate for thermal energy storage is Iowa. The Midwest has ample wind resources. Already, 15 percent of Iowa’s electricity is generated by wind, the highest percentage in the nation, and industry estimates indicate it could rise to as much as 20 percent this year. But, absent transmission lines adequate to carry the peak power to urban centers, wind farm operators are in a bit of a conundrum.

Sitting in his HUCE office, Baker calls up a real time map of electricity prices from wind across the country, showing the strange situation of prices going negative. Windmills that spin when demand is low can overload the system so much that, if operators didn’t shut off the windmills, they’d pay people to use electricity. Needless to say, they shut off the windmills.

“We’re throwing away free energy,” Baker says. Instead of shutting the turbines down, Baker asks, why not use energy storage strategies to charge the electric cars of people in the area and heat their homes?

“The alternative is to put controllable load around those places,” Baker says. “Why not charge everyone’s cars up or, alternatively, why not just get everyone’s bricks hot? Every single day, absolutely reliably, the price of electricity varies by a factor of two or three. If it’s 6-7-8 cents a kilowatt hour at 7 p.m., it’s two to three cents at 2 a.m.”

Now that the successful Vinalhaven thermal energy storage pilot program has ended, the Fox Islands Electric Co-op is considering what to do next. Island Energy Task Force member Lachman says a necessary step to widespread installation of the heaters will be to create a new rate structure so that the co-op can charge different rates for those who use the heaters. They also have to decide how many heaters they can install and who should get them. It’s likely, he says, that town buildings will be first in line, since that would benefit the entire community.

The islands are looking for other ways to take advantage of Vinalhaven’s surplus wind power, such as importing electric cars that could be charged overnight when power is cheap. The shorter range of an electric vehicle is not a big concern on the islands’ limited terrain. Details of a possible trial are still being worked out, Lachman says.

“We have a tremendous amount of interest on the island in energy now. Now that we have a $14.5 million dollar project, how do we utilize this to take another step in innovating?” says Lachman. “I think what the Fox Islands have done is major, it’s a big step for an island community to show what’s possible elsewhere."

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This article originally appeared in Environment@Harvard Volume 3, Issue 2.