I have a new perspective out here along the shore. Facing northeast I now can see white towers standing on the distant Gros Cap heights. The windmills are rising.
In time there will be something like 160 of the giants. They stand over 50 meters, and with their wing sweep will take in another 100 feet. Because they are so close to the Sault, Ontario airport I'm sure the hillside will be twinkling like a Christmas window every night.
They are grabbing the wind out of the sky and sending its power down cables to other parts of the world. The power is enough to light and heat 40,000 homes. It's clean, and unobtrusive to the earth's skin, and other than migrating birds, it's a fairly benign development.
It's the first significant energy development around here since Clergue dug a ditch in the American Sault and ran water through turbines almost 100 years ago. He did that to attract new industry, and for a while, it worked.
Clergue's idea of local power and what we would now call energy independence has gone the way of the cable, literally. The cables carry the hydro energy to other parts of the world, mingling with energy created in coal and gas plants, indistinguishable, and nothing special. The local, cleanly generated and seemingly endless hydro power is no longer "ours".
A couple of weeks ago I suggested that the county board consider creating an Internet utility for the entire region, blanketing the area in signal. After watching the wind farm rise in another part of the world, yet out our front doors, the idea took another turn.
The county should create an energy policy. It should study what we have, what our potential for generating power is, and then consider creating energy. The tribe has already begun a study of its own, and it could lead, or certainly guide the rest of the county once it knows what the potential for wind power is on this side of the lake. The Bay Mills Indian Community is being much wiser, and in fact prescient about the need to get ahead of this energy question
Other energy options exist. My favorite is individual energy creation ... no transmission grid, just small residential energy packages that would free us all from blackouts and power outages. An entity like the county could research what it might take to make an energy-efficient peninsula.
Clergue was right a hundred years ago. It's time to re-visit his idea and consider putting this region ahead of the game. Politicians are famous for generating a lot of wind, and maybe they could take a cue from the windmills and funnel it to a place where it can be useful.
Pat Egan is the former publisher of the Sault Evening News. He is a recipient of the William Allen White award for editorial writing. He and his wife Debra live at Salt Point.
