BANGOR DAILY NEWS • April 8, 2021
For nearly two decades, commercial wind farms have been touted in Maine as a way to generate electricity without pollution, and as a way rural locales in Maine can generate revenue for themselves by hosting turbines worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But several counties and towns are finding out they are getting less revenue out of the wind projects than they had expected when they were wooed in the 2000s and 2010s by developers looking to erect turbines several hundred feet tall along local remote, elevated ridgelines. In some cases, the developers are arguing that recent advancements in wind turbine technology have made newer models so efficient that older, less efficient turbines erected nearly a decade or more ago have lost much of their taxable value.