It's a 5 hour drive from Bar Harbor to Fundy National Park in New Brunswick, plus a border crossing that went very quickly. We set out early to make sure we had plenty of time to settle in once we got there.
One thing I was sad that we would not see was this giant wind farm in Nova Scotia, right after the NB/NS border. 10 years ago I was so struck by this. We took a break at the near by rest stop and just watch the dancing of the turbines for a while.
SP Amherst Wind Power LP - from Google Street View
But we were not to be disappointed. On the drive to the park we saw 3 new wind farms (1 in Maine, 2 in New Brunswick) that weren't there 10 years ago. Progress!
The first one in Maine was breathtaking. After seeing a few off to the side of the road, we start our accent up this long hill. Right in front is a turbine that grows in your field of view as you climb. Your sensation is that you're going to drive right into it, then you take a bend to the left and pass it by. My heart leapt. It was moving in a way I hadn't expected.
Weaver Hill Wind - from Google Street View
The Awe of Great Machines
Wind Turbines create 2 incredible kinds of awe for me. The first is that of any great machines. Machines that are not of human scale. Last summer we saw the giant iron mining ports of Lake Superior, and they evoke an awe just from their scale. They are marvels of engineering. And they aren't static like a building. They move. They are dynamic. And when a great machine moves, it seems like it does so so slowly and deliberately because the scale of the thing is so different from normal experience. It feels like it breaks physics because it's operating beyond a human scale. And we built that.
The second kind of awe is what Wind Turbines themselves represent, progress. Every time I see a new solar farm, a rooftop with panels I hadn't noticed yet, a mini split condenser, an EV on the road, I have a spark of hope. They are climate solutions made manifest. And in noticing them, and how they grow over time, we can see the clean energy transition happening before us. Wind turbines are this at a whole other scale.
The turbines we saw in Maine were the Weaver Project, installed in 2020. Those are 3.3MW towers, which are the biggest I've seen in person (the ones in the Berkshires are < 2MW). Every couple of rotations of the blades of these great machines is all the power a home uses in a day. As you drive by you see multiple homes worth of power be generated before your eyes.
Symbols Made Visible
One thing that frustrates me is how much we try to hide the infrastructure of progress. In my area of New York ground based solar needs to be hidden with hedgerows, while a lot of community solar is going in, you don't see it. Wind is off the table. In Vermont 2 decades ago they passed a low that prohibits ever putting wind turbines on the ridge lines, even though it's some of the better wind in New England.
I want to see Wind Turbines. They are progress. They are beautiful. They show us that we can make a change and bring in the future.