When Amy Turner took over as chief executive of the Fox Islands Electric Cooperative (FIEC) in 2020, she inherited a question that islanders had been asking for more than a decade: as the three wind turbines spinning on the island of Vinalhaven, approximately 11 miles off the Maine coast, approached the end of their useful life, were they actually worth it? Turner, an attorney who had previously served as general counsel for an electric cooperative in Colorado, did what a good lawyer does. She went looking for the evidence, digging into 15 years of cost data to build the full picture of what electricity had actually cost the islands.
The answer turned out to be a number worth sharing. The turbines saved FIEC customers $1,374,871 in energy costs from 2010 to 2024. For 10 of the wind farm’s first 11 years, the islands paid less for electricity than the going rate on the regional grid operated by the Independent System Operator New England (ISO-NE). Vinalhaven and North Haven, together known as the Fox Islands, lie in Penobscot Bay and are reachable only by boat or aircraft. Every kilowatt-hour is expensive, and the alternative is buying power from the mainland, so that is real money kept in the community.
The island residents took their energy future into their own hands a long time ago. They formed the Fox Islands Electric Cooperative in 1975 with a loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Rural Utilities Service. Three decades later, they decided to go further. In 2008, cooperative members voted 98.7% in favor of building a wind project to serve the islands. Fox Islands Wind (FIW) launched commercial operations in 2009.
The result is a 4.5-megawatt wind farm with three turbines, now owned and managed by the community. The wind it captures is delivered straight to the cooperative’s substation on Vinalhaven, and that detail matters more than it might sound. Annual power demand on the islands has increased by about 1% each year since 2010, with 15% growth expected over the coming decade. However, the islands lose about 8% of the energy they buy from the mainland to line losses in their roughly 15-mile submarine power cable, a cost customers still have to cover. Power made on the island, however, arrives with almost no loss. As the cooperative described, “By generating our own clean energy, the Fox Islands community takes control of its energy destiny, reducing vulnerabilities and ensuring a more secure and sustainable energy future.”
Hannah Pingree, a North Haven resident and former director of the Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future, told the Island Institute, “Fox Islands Wind came about as our island communities faced an urgent crisis of how to replace a failing, expensive power cable and realize the benefits of locally generated clean power. Its existence speaks to the ability of small communities to accomplish big, clean energy projects for the benefit of local citizens.”
Additionally, a four-person island crew handles outages and maintenance, and Turner has noted that they always restore power faster than a mainland company focused on population centers. For communities that watch winter storms roll in across open water, owning the generation closest to home is its own kind of insurance.
Photo Courtesy Fox Islands Electric Cooperative
The wind farm also delivers practical environmental stewardship. “Every MW of energy FIW generates decreases CO2 generation from the Fox Islands’ energy grid,” the cooperative described. As it currently stands, the wind project offsets about half of FIEC’s annual carbon emissions, at about 2,836 tons. In their repowered form, the turbines will offset more than 5,000 tons of emissions, bringing FIEC’s generation sources to about 89% greenhouse gas-free. By adding utility-scale solar and battery storage in the future, they will approach 100%.
However, cost is the main driver. Electricity is painfully expensive in Maine. Over the last decade, the state’s average retail electricity price rose at the third-highest rate in the country, surpassed only by California and Massachusetts, according to an analysis by The Maine Monitor. Against that backdrop, the cooperative’s bet on homegrown power looks less like an environmental statement and more like sound household budgeting at the community scale.
Turner’s reading of the data pointed to a simple principle. The more power the islands produce and then use to meet their own needs, she said, “the better off we’re going to be from the standpoints of reliability, affordability, and environmental responsibility.”
By 2025, the case was getting easier to make. Fox Islands Wind generated 8,742 megawatt-hours of electricity that year, 18% above budget and its strongest output since 2021, after a renewed focus on preventative maintenance reversed several years of mechanical setbacks, increasing reliability and resulting in more on-island energy generation.
Photo Courtesy Fox Islands Electric Cooperative
As the turbines aged, the islands were left with a choice: repower the aging machines or tear them down and purchase all of their power from mainland sources, as investigations of energy sources on the islands found that “no other known energy sources are viable by themselves to fully replace the wind farm.” In January 2025, the USDA awarded the cooperative $8.7 million, mostly in the form of low-interest loans, through its Empowering Rural America (New ERA) program to help repower the wind farm and add a solar array on a capped landfill. George Kendrick, president of Fox Islands Wind, told Maine Public that the federal money would help, but that the decision was never the board’s to make alone. “Most importantly, the entire plan will require approval from FIEC members through a community-wide vote before moving forward,” he said.
That vote came last summer. In July 2025, members voted in favor of partial repowering, replacing the worn internal equipment and blades with more efficient versions while reusing the existing towers and foundations. The upgrade is expected to increase energy production by about 30% and extend the turbines’ life by another 20 years. For the average customer, repowering will trim the energy charge on the monthly bill by about $216 a year.
The islanders have, in other words, looked at the receipts and decided to keep their energy in their own hands, with new turbine components expected to be installed in 2029 or 2030. For a community that voted almost unanimously to build something big two decades ago, the second vote was less a leap of faith than a calculation that had already paid off once. After all, FIW’s mission is to “deliver reliable, affordable, responsible energy to the Fox Islands.”
