Pictured is a Geographical Information Systems (GIS) map for the Waterville/Winslow/Fairfield area. This particular map was produced in support of the Waterville sustainability project begun just recently, in which two of our Sustainability Design and Technology (Sustech) degree program students are interns this summer. Click on the map to enlarge it as a .jpeg image.The map shows the US Geological Survey 20 foot contours (brown), the 911 roads system data (black), the wetlands zoning areas (blue), and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) 50 meter Above Ground Level (AGL) wind contours (red) for the state of Maine. These are GIS overlays that anyone who can use a GIS program can get for free from the Maine State GIS Library and the NREL. On this particular map, the only wind contour seen is the 5 to 5.5 meter per second mean annual wind speed contour. The next contour up, the 5.5 to 6 m/s one, marks the lower bound of the range for commercially-viable net-metered turbine sites, the one after that, 6 to 6.5 m/s, is the lower bound of the range for commercial wholesale-power turbines.
I can put this map up here without fear of igniting any local controversy or panic, because the map demonstrates that any commercial scale wind power scheme in this area would be more or less doomed to failure! There are no sites in any of these towns that have those other two contours, and thus no sites that I would particularly wish to take to the next level of testing and data collection, which is anemometry.
(The NREL wind data, even at this high resolution, is not recommended for use in anemometric or econometric modeling of wind turbine power output. Our experiences, and those of many other wind resource assessment folks, is that on actual measurement the margin of error can be found to be as much as 1 to 1.5 meters per second of mean annual wind speed. But this data is very good for figuring out which sites might support wind power development.)
If you are part of a community that is considering a wind power scheme, you probably should have us make you one of these maps for your town, or, if you are only mildly technogeeky, you can make one for yourself.
Communities can get such a map without making it for themselves in Microsoft PowerPoint or Word or .jpeg format by emailing Mick Womersley (the blogmeister) at mwomersley@unity.edu
We can also print the maps in poster format, but there will be a small fee for that service. I haven't had time to figure out how much yet.
You can find out about our Unity College Community Wind Assessment program, a community service learning program affiliated with our Sustech degree in which students help communities with wind power planning questions by using anemometry, econometrics, and GIS and other computer modeling, by visiting this web page here:
http://www.unity.edu/facultypages/womersley/windweb.htm
If you are reading this and are a high school student or community member in the state of Maine who doesn't have a GIS program but would like to learn how to use one, you can now download the new full-service, but open source platform, Quantum GIS or Q-GIS for free at http://www.qgis.org/
Mainers involved in any local planning effort can now access or use this innovative software by themselves. Up to this point the Maine State GIS office has done a great job of making data available, but they simply don't have the resources to do custom GIS maps for local planning efforts, as many town officials have found out upon requesting such services.
Q-GIS can help us get past this bottleneck.
Unlike other GIS platforms, Q-GIS runs on Unix, Linux, Macintosh and IBM-compatible machines. It comes with full instructions, which although not exactly super user-friendly, don't take a rocket scientist to figure out. And unlike other popular platforms, which are usually expensive, this one is absolutely free.
(I may be an applied scientist, but I'm definitely not a rocket scientist in the usual meaning of the phrase. I failed my first college statistics class, although not for lack of math ability: It was taught by an adjunct with a heavy accent and I couldn't understand a work he said. He also got mad whenever he was asked a question. But just in case this makes you nervous, I did later pass the class, and then went on to take stats, quantitative analysis, modeling and econometrics at the PhD level. Ever since then I've been circumspect about inexperienced college teachers, and more than usually interested in seemingly poor-performing students. A lot of ordinary kids mistakenly thought stupid are more often just the product of poor and arrogant teachers.)
If you are in the Maine State High School Laptop Program you already have GIS software on your Macintosh computer called My World. Your geography teacher should be able to help you figure out how to use this software, which is also a full-service GIS application. Not all the geography teachers have figured out how to use the software, but you should ask around for help. If all else fails, email us.
The various layers are available from the State of Maine GIS Library and the NREL data pages.
Now before I get any more argumentative emails from anti-wind power types, let me point out that this is just good information, which should be helpful to every wind power controversy in the state, and should hurt no one. In fact, as should be pretty clear from the example above, getting a good GIS wind map can help rule out large areas very quickly. GIS can also be used to rationally test out setbacks, noise, view shed, and other important considerations, in order to scientifically determine what the impacts of a given proposal are.
Those Maine communities struggling with the question of whether to permit large commercial schemes would also benefit from GIS studies which could be used to find out if companies are accurately representing the environmental impacts of the turbines they propose.
Up until now, Maine communities, who as individual and community landowners actually own the resource legally (and in my book morally), have definitely been outgunned by the commercial firms, who of course have all of these technical services available to them, the anemometry which they tend to keep as a commercial secret, the econometrics, and the GIS.
As a result, Maine towns become economic colonies for commercial wind power companies to exploit.
Our publication of, and assistance with, this new open source GIS system will help to redress this imbalance.
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