Discussions about commercial wind power development in Maine focus partly on economic issues and partly on environmental issues.

The environmental impacts of wind development are very much tied to specific sites, so it is difficult to draw generalizations about those impacts across all wind power projects.

The economic issues are fairly common across all projects, but media discussions of wind power economics often overemphasize the least important economic aspects while distorting the most important aspects.

The most common economic questions about wind projects have focused on jobs. In fact, building Maine wind power projects has been an important activity over the last several years, supporting more than 500 jobs in construction and related services in 2008 and 2009 at a time when the economy lost 30,000 jobs. The job impacts have been largest in rural areas where the needs are greatest.

But construction is a short-lived stimulus; the real question is what does Maine get in the long term. We get needed electricity with no fuel costs, thereby avoiding the price volatility that comes with fossil fuels, and no air emissions, thereby avoiding the associated health and environmental damages whose costs are hidden under our current electricity pricing policies, as documented in a 2009 National Academy of Sciences report.

A properly functioning electricity market would include these hidden costs in the price of electricity from all sources, so that the price we pay reflects the full costs to society. However, currently we pay those health and environmental costs not in our monthly utility bills, but, for example, in our medical bills -- Maine has some of the highest asthma rates in the nation, and several counties routinely receive failing grades for outdoor air quality.

So fossil fuels appear cheaper than they actually are because their prices are distorted. Another reason is that new energy technologies are expensive when first deployed, but become less expensive over time as research, development and deployment lower costs. Wind power can appear less competitive than it actually is if many of the real costs of fossil fuels are hidden, and if future cost savings forthcoming from wind power are not recognized. As a nation, we attempt to make up the difference with supports for wind power development, which have been called "subsidies."

These subsidies attempt both to compensate for the hidden cost problem, thereby leveling the playing field for wind power, and to make it possible to realize future cost savings through RD&D.

Subsidies currently exist for fossil fuels too, although these have little economic rationale. Subsidizing fossil fuels is subsidizing the health and environmental damages that their emissions create. In addition, fossil fuel industries are mature and have already realized the lion's share of benefits from RD&D.