He spent two years in Aroostook County before he ever touched a solar panel.
Yehuda Gittelson came up through the wind, working on farm development projects in Maine’s northernmost county before relocating to Portland to install photovoltaic systems for Solaris Energy Solutions. That early stretch in The County gave him a vantage point most solar technicians don’t have. He watched a region sitting on one of the most productive wind corridors in the Northeast spend years circling the same unresolved problem.
The wind blows hard up there. Almost none of it reaches the grid.
Wires Are the Hard Part
Aroostook County covers more than 6,800 square miles and holds a population of roughly 67,000, nearly the same headcount as the city of Portland, four hours to the south. Its population has dropped close to half since 1966, when roughly 112,000 people called it home year-round. The closure of Loring Air Force Base in 1994 accelerated a decline that the potato and timber industries had already set in motion. The median age now sits at 49, about 10% above the rest of Maine.
The problem has never been the wind resource. It’s been infrastructure.
Northern Maine sits outside the ISO New England grid. Power generated there has no direct route south — it must travel through New Brunswick before looping back into New England, a path that has made large-scale wind development financially unworkable for project after project across multiple developers and over multiple decades.
“When I was up there, you could see the turbines on the ridge at Mars Hill and know that what was happening was just the beginning,” Gittelson says. “The resource is real. It’s the wires that aren’t there yet.”
So Close, So Many Times
Longroad Energy’s King Pine Wind project, planned for northwest of Houlton with up to 179 turbines and a projected capacity of 1,000 megawatts, would double Maine’s wind power capacity and generate the equivalent of 27% of the state’s electric usage if built as proposed. At an estimated $2 billion, it would be the largest onshore wind development east of the Mississippi River.
Massachusetts agreed in late 2022 to purchase 40% of King Pine’s output, giving the project a revenue anchor. Then the transmission piece collapsed. LS Power, selected to build a line stretching 100 to 140 miles from Aroostook to the regional grid, withdrew its fixed-price bid by the end of 2023 after cost overruns made the original contract untenable.
The Maine PUC restarted the procurement process.
October 2024 brought a fresh development: the U.S. Department of Energy awarded a $425 million capacity contract to Avangrid, parent company of Central Maine Power, contingent on Avangrid winning the state’s new transmission bid. By late 2025, the PUC had issued a draft request for proposals and was reviewing public comments, with a contractor selection targeted before year’s end.
“Every time it gets close, something falls through,” Gittelson says. “But the pressure keeps building. The grid needs the power, the county needs the jobs, and onshore wind is still one of the cheapest sources you can build.”
Climb Test Required
Workforce development has not waited for construction to begin.
Northern Maine Community College has run a wind power technician program for roughly 15 years, graduating around 100 students who have taken jobs across New England and beyond. The college received $2 million in federal funding to expand the program and is working toward becoming the first internationally certified wind power safety training provider in the northeastern United States.
Wind technician salaries in Maine run between $40,000 and $70,000 annually. The nine-month program covers electrical and mechanical systems, along with hands-on diagnostics. A March 2023 presentation by the state’s Clean Energy Partnership program manager found that 60% of clean energy companies had struggled to fill open positions.
The physical barriers are real. Before a candidate is hired, they must climb a turbine tower under their own power, without assistance. Those who can’t make it don’t move forward.
“That weeds people out fast,” Gittelson says. “But the ones who stick with it are exactly who you want on a tower. The electrical and mechanical diagnostics — that’s what takes real time to learn.”
A Reason to Stay
Aroostook County’s 2026 population is estimated at just over 66,000, and it is still declining. Its median household income of $54,254 sits well below the state average. Wind projects of King Pine’s scale would bring hundreds of millions of dollars in construction spending, thousands of full-time-equivalent jobs during the build phase, and tens of millions in annual property taxes, according to analyses of comparable projects cited by Longroad Energy. State law requires wind developers to pay at least $4,000 per turbine per year in host community benefits, though King Pine has indicated it plans to negotiate a higher figure with local jurisdictions.
“The county’s been losing people for a long time,” Gittelson says. “A wind project doesn’t fix that by itself. But it’s the kind of anchor that gives someone a reason to stay.”
