Thank you for allowing me to speak. My name is Wendy Todd. I am from Aroostook County. I am a resident of Mars Hill and live approximately 2600 feet from the Mars Hill Wind Project. I am here today to offer testimony that residents around the project are suffering. There are 18 families that I know of that are negatively impacted on a regular basis from the noise, strobe effect and shadow flicker from the turbines. Most of these 18 families live less than 3000 feet from the turbines. There is no one that I know of from 425 East Ridge Road to 212 Mountain Road that does not agree that there are issues with noise. Issues that are changing the way residents view life around the mountain. We have formed a group called the Mountain Landowners Association in an attempt to share information and come up to speed on the issues of living this close to turbines of this size and generation. We have had to struggle through massive amounts of documentation from the Internet and from other towns that are dealing with the same issues.

The Long Island Power Authority's proposal to build a grid of industrial-strength wind generators a few miles into the ocean off Jones Beach is adrift. It's too expensive, and it should remain at sea.

So why is this higher mandate likely to hike your bills? Because when government creates an artificial market by fiat, shortages almost always follow (of turbines for wind power, for example), thus boosting the mandate’s cost. For that matter, if all forms of renewable energy could compete on their own, they wouldn’t need a mandate in the first place.

To produce useable wind-generated electricity, other obstacles must be overcome. Perhaps most importantly, wind power is intermittent ...Therefore, reliable back-up power generating facilities must be on hand and ready to fill in when wind generation is absent. These realities require duplicate capital investment and, to some extent, duplicate operating expenses.

The bill would require doubling in three years of the share of electric utility output that comes from renewable sources-wind, solar, geothermal, biomass-from three percent now to six percent in 2012. In a further leap of central-planning arrogance, the bill would raise that standard in stages to 25 percent in 2025. Sounds good? Maybe, but the technology to do it doesn't exist.

"Green jobs" have become a central underpinning of the Obama administration's rationale to promote clean energy. But how valid is the assumption that a "clean-energy" economy will generate enough jobs to mitigate today's high level of unemployment -- new jobless claims were up 22,000 this week -- and to meet the needs of future generations? A green economy would have to spout jobs in the millions to do both. The facts challenge the prevailing thinking among some policymakers and officials that green jobs are a principal reason for transforming the economy.

This power cost taxpayers $135 per megawatt, totalling $7,852,276. At the same time, because wind power has priority over cheaper forms of electricity production, Ontario had to export 127,361 megawatt hours at $20.40 per megawatt. But by far the worst fact about that weekend is that OPG spilled (or wasted) clean renewable hydro power because of wind priority on the grid.

If wind energy really is the energy of the future, as the developers claim, it must prove itself in the market without government subsidies. This has not yet happened anywhere; the projections are all based on artificial models with hidden costs -- costs for you and me, the taxpayers and consumers.

A recent study by respected energy economist Gerry Angevine for the Fraser Institute found that Ontario residents will pay an average of $285 million more for electricity each year for the next 20 years as a result of subsidies to renewable energy companies. ...Even more alarming for the province's economic competitiveness, businesses and industrial customers will be hit by almost $12 billion in additional costs over the same period.

Short-term thinking on energy is going to cause some long-term problems Ask Paul Edmonds, vice president of National Semiconductor in South Portland. In August, he wrote in the Portland Press Herald, "An inefficient regulatory system and lack of long-term energy strategy are conspiring against Maine citizens and businesses." I was intrigued. So I called him. He told me, "High electricity costs are a threat to manufacturing competitiveness in Maine."

The ferocious opposition from Massachusetts liberals to the Cape Wind project has provided a useful education in green energy politics. And now that the Nantucket Sound wind farm has won federal approval, this decade-long saga may prove edifying in green energy economics too: Namely, the price of electricity from wind is more than twice what consumers now pay.

Participants in the small-vessel commercial fishing business need some scientific basis for a management plan that will keep them in business and keep the species they harvest healthy. Fishermen have often come late to the game, without the data necessary to counter the information that the regulators mistakenly believe tells the entire story.

Why should these massive, noisy and ugly industrial monsters be allowed to be sited so close to our homes? ... Little, if any, consideration is given to local people's views. Occasionally the companies involved might offer a presentation, staffed by slick professional salespeople, or they try to sweeten the locals with perhaps a new community centre or maybe a playground, when actually this money has already come out of our pockets in electricity bills or via our taxes in the form of subsidies. They are frankly little more than latter-day carpetbaggers, mainly from the south, coming to rape our countryside.

American University's Investigative Reporting Workshop found that foreign turbine makers have received about 80 percent of nearly $2 billion in stimulus wind-power funding. The workshop estimates about 6,000 jobs have been created overseas versus just a few hundred here.

According to data recorded from actual wind generators located from the Mexican border to the Canadian border through the high plains including Nebraska and wind information from Northwest's service area, the lights will be on only 30-40% of the time with much of it at partial power. Due to the fact that most renewable resources are intermittent their generation equipment becomes a duplication of electric generation cost and will increase the cost of providing electricity to all because the full capacity of our other resources must be in place and rotating at all times.

You know the saying: Ignorance is bliss. Unfortunately for the American taxpayer, when it comes to the wind turbine industry, ignorance is not as blissful as it is infuriating. According to a new report by the Investigative Reporting Workshop (in coordination with ABC's World News with Diane Sawyer and the Watchdog Institute), Obama can now add wind turbines to his growing list of failures within the stimulus package.

Official figures have revealed a catastrophic decline in Scottish tourism last year ...VisitScotland chairman Mike Cantlay has blamed the poor weather. Since when do tourists come to Scotland for the weather? ...This is the same tourism chief who claimed a few weeks ago that giant industrial wind turbines which now scar some of our most beautiful hills and glens are not a deterrent to tourists.

Does the BWEA think it unreasonable that SWATT request that the Welsh Assembly call a moratorium on wind farm development until independent surveys are executed on these vital issues. Concerning the election, our campaign resulted in us getting the issue onto the election agenda. And the two anti-TAN 8 main parties were the ones who gained seats in the elections.

The debate over wind turbines for Meredith is already an emotionally charged one. It is an issue that pits neighbor against neighbor; for a landowner, receiving payment from a wind company to erect these monstrosities on his property effectively does so at the expense of his immediate neighbors. Therefore, I find it hard to understand the assertion from members of the town board that this is good for Meredith. This is, in fact, tearing our town apart, and one need only attend a town board meeting to realize the anger that is being generated will be with us for a very, very long time.