Something for the Gridlet

by Eva Murray

On this particular island, electricity customers do not rely on Central Maine Power. We are ably served by the Matinicus Plantation Electric Company which, despite what I have been assured with some considerable frequency by people who have never been here, is not a co-op, not a left-over civil defense installation, not the informal hobby of some eccentric engineering geek, and not a series of backyard pull-start generators.

Matinicus ratepayers purchase electricity from a municipally-owned utility that is regulated by the Public Utilities Commission just like the large companies. It operates as a non-profit but it is not a charity. MPE owns one bucket truck, employs one part-time all-around technical employee and one part-time pencil-and-paper bookkeeper, with a couple of local helpers around to back up the lineman from time to time. Despite this informality, it is not true that “we can do whatever we want” with regard to rates, alternative energy experiments, dealing with receivables, or safety procedures. MPE is a normal power company in every way that matters; it is just extremely small.

This year, MPE is planning on replacing our 71-series Detroits with more advanced, fuel-efficient diesel engines and, if we can get the funding, hopefully adding a renewable energy component. To be sure, we hear some criticism from a few folks for even running a diesel plant, as if it were an act of deliberate environmental depravity or evidence of a surprising degree of ignorance.

Again and again well-meaning visitors remind us of the presence of the wind, as though that ubiquitous force had somehow escaped the neighborhood’s notice. Offshore islanders live with the wind. We eat, sleep, live and breathe the weather report, and you can be sure that the well-studied marine forecast is not all about the afternoon’s high temperature! Half the time, it seems, the wind is preventing us from traveling across the bay, from making our living, or from enjoying the pleasures of our lovely island. The wind is the prevailing weather, a tyrant, and a bully. On occasion it makes us crazy, enforces our isolation, even puts us in danger. Yet people still see fit to mention, “Hey, have you ever thought about the wind?” Gee, no, dude, I never noticed it. They ask, “Why don’t you guys just put up some wind turbines like they have on Vinalhaven?”

There are various reasons why we don’t already have wind power here—most technical, a few economic including a lack of town-owned property and the cost of specially-designed equipment suited to our peculiar size. One thing many people who preach to us about energy fail to consider: there has to be a storage capability. Even here, the wind does not blow steadily. Vinalhaven has a cable to the mainland. Central Maine Power is the “storage battery,” if you will, for the Fox Islands Electric Co-op. Those wind turbines generate more power than the year-rounders of Vinalhaven and North Haven need in the winter, when the default condition tends toward “gale,” and less than is required in the summer when the population booms as the wind subsides. Over the course of a year the power generated may be just what the islanders need, but on no particular day is that arithmetic likely to be exactly right. Essentially it’s like a homeowner with a small wind turbine who has a net-metering arrangement with his utility; his household meter runs in both directions, and he is both buying and selling electricity depending upon demand and conditions. The connection to the larger “power grid” is a necessary part of the alternative-energy package. In the case of an off-the-grid home owner, this storage function is met by batteries (or by simply not expecting 24-7 electricity, hardly an option for a regulated municipal utility!) Improved battery technology may allow MPE to add a renewable (probably solar) component to our electricity infrastructure soon, but we’ll still be counting on that diesel plant for much of our power.

Matinicus Island has no cable to the mainland. Television is satellite or take-your-chances-with-the- weather broadcast, landline telephone and Internet are microwave dish-to-dish, and references to “the power grid” make some of us smile. We are the grid, a tiny grid all by ourselves. A gridlet, maybe.