Maine's island communities face some big challenges these days.

And one of the biggest is the cost of energy, which can be two to five times higher on some islands than on the mainland.

But islanders are resourceful if nothing else, and they're sensing a huge opportunity in the breeze that sweeps over them virtually every day.

''Islands are small pieces of land surrounded by lots of water, and they're also small pieces of land surrounded by lots of wind,'' said Philip Conkling, president of the Island Institute in Rockland.

Maine's 15 islands with year-round residents are, in many ways, the most likely places to lead the transition away from dirty, expensive fossil fuels. Vinalhaven and North Haven are well on their way, with plans to convert to wind energy starting next summer. Others plan to follow.

Islanders now hope to sustain their communities using the same winds that fueled their settlement in the age of sail.

''It's taking really a historically valuable resource that hasn't been used for roughly 100 years and putting it back to work,'' Conkling said.

So you’re thinking about dusting off the old bike and pedaling to work.

There are a number of good reasons, including $4 per gallon gasoline, global warming and those extra pounds you’d like to burn off.

Standing in the way, however, is an entire transportation culture that’s built around cars and trucks and is openly hostile to anything that can’t keep up.

Still, the number of people biking to work this summer is clearly way up, though no one knows by how much. And the trend, together with better safety laws, appears to be making the roadways a little more welcoming, bikers say.

Volkhard Lindner of South Portland has been riding bikes to school and work for 40 years, first in Germany where he grew up and then in American cities from Seattle to Portland.

“Biking is a lot more part of the culture” in Europe, he said. “It’s seen more as a means of transportation, where here its seen more as a form of exercise.”

Some American cities, such as Seattle and Portland, Ore., are known for their bike lanes, trails, parking facilities, safety laws and education programs, among other things.

Maine isn’t a horrible place to ride, said Lindner, who bikes year round to his job as a medical researcher in Scarborough. He and others are quick to encourage more people to make the switch, as long as they know and follow the safety rules.

But Mainers have plenty of good excuses to stay in their cars and pickups.

Sprawl has put a lot of us out of comfortable pedaling range, for one thing. The average Maine commute is nine miles, though many of the people who can least afford gasoline live 20 miles or more from work.

Our roads are designed for Ford F-150s, not Treks. In cities such as Portland, there are notorious hazard zones for bikers – try Congress Street through Stroudwater or Tukey’s Bridge, to mention a couple.

Country roads tend to be narrow with no shoulders. And during pothole season, which peaks in April but never entirely ends, the edges of those roads can resemble mountain bike courses.

Even the traffic lights are against bikers. Motion sensors don’t detect bicycles (or motorized scooters and motorcycles, for that matter), so law-abiding riders sometimes have to wait for a car to come along to trip the sensor and change the light.

But the most intimidating thing for many would-be bike commuters is the traffic. While long-time riders insist it’s possible to do it safely, they also tell stories of being beeped at, yelled at, cut off and, in some cases, knocked down.

Lindner has had drinks thrown in his face. Sometimes, he said in a faint German accent, “they show you the bird.”

“They like to scare you, so they come up from behind and scream at the top of their lungs,” he said. “You have to be a pretty good biker when people are giving you one foot as they pass you.”

But that is changing now, and many motorists are sharing the road, according to Lindner and other bikers.

A state law passed last year requires cars and trucks to give bikes at least three feet of clearance as they pass. There hasn’t exactly been a police crackdown to enforce that one, but the law has had an educational effect, bikers said.

“There are clearly some who know there’s a three-foot law now,” Lindner said. “Some are very conscientious and really watch out for you.”

Where’s that tire pump?

Mainers are keeping their wood stoves well fed this winter, and that’s a good thing, for the most part. It means less oil drilling, refining and burning and more energy dollars for a local, renewable resource, among other things.

The down side is that many of those wood stoves are old, inefficient and dirty. Newer stoves – those certified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – are designed to burn the fuel and the emissions more completely so that they put fewer fine particles into the air. As older stoves are replaced with newer ones, the air is getting cleaner. But it’s a slow process.

Here’s a story we ran this month about the return to wood, and the risks.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, wants to speed the transition to cleaner stoves and introduced legislation Wednesday for a $500 tax incentive. Under the bill, a family that replaces a dirty, old stove with a new, efficient one – they can easily cost $1,500 or more – would have their federal tax bill reduced by $500.

In her weekly column sent out last week, Collins said there are about 10 million wood stoves nationwide and as many as 75 percent of those are old and inefficient .

“These new wood and wood pellet stoves, which have been certified as clean-burning by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency since 1992, can cut emissions by more than 70 percent and use as much as a third less firewood for the same amount of heat.... Making the change from an old, dirty, and inefficient wood stove to a modern, clean and safe stove is, however, an expensive undertaking, one that is especially difficult for many families today.”

A tax credit could be a tough sell, but we'll see it goes. In the meantime, operating a wood stove properly can also cut emissions, no matter how old it is. Here are tips from the Maine DEP for making any stove cleaner and more efficient.

Maine’s love-hate relationship with wind power will face a big test on Monday. Actually, a couple of them.

Two wind farm proposals could face up-or-down votes by the Maine Land Use Regulation Commission, the zoning board for northern Maine.

All bets are off about whether the projects are in for a warm hug or a cold shoulder.

Both projects would be in the hills of Franklin County, and together they would double Maine’s wind power capacity.

Take that Al Gore and Ted Kennedy.

Now maybe George H.W. and Barbara Bush hadn’t even thought of all the political symbolism at play here, but there’s no reason we can’t spice up the story about the new wind turbine at Walker’s Point in Kennebunkport. In fact, we can’t resist.

The former president’s new Skystream 3.7 brings to mind the criticisms of Al Gore’s energy use at his home, something eager critics pointed to as another reason to ignore Gore and the thousands of scientists who essentially agree with him about fossil fuels and global warming. It may not win him a Nobel Peace Prize, but former president Bush made a powerful statement this week without saying a word.

It also brings to mind the opposition by Sen. Ted Kennedy and others to a proposed offshore wind farm within view of Martha’s Vineyard and the Kennedy compound. Of course, the Bushes didn’t put their one little windmill in front of the picture window, and it’ll have more impact on their neighbors’ views than their own.

The neighbors in Kennebunkport can’t all be pleased, but don’t count on a lot of public criticism from the other mansions on Ocean Avenue. These are the Bushes and this isn’t suburban Scarborough, where one family’s solar panels started a neighborhood feud last summer.

The Bushes not only gave a big endorsement to alternative energy, they also are demonstrating, in its simplest form, the controversial concept of energy credits or offsets. Their windmill, you see, will generate power for the grid all winter when they’re not home and the lights are off. When they return in the spring and turn on the lights and the furnace, the clean energy they sold all winter will essentially offset their electricity and fossil fuel use in the summer.

Well, it’ll offset some of their energy use, at least. I’m guessing ol’ 41 isn’t going to trade his 825-horsepower Fidelity III power boat for one with sails. Wind is no substitute for petro when it comes to racing across the ocean at 60 mph. One step at a time.

Solar-powered homes around the state are opening their doors to the public Saturday in an effort to spread the word about alternative energy and cool the planet.

It’s part of the 12th annual National Solar Tour sponsored by the American Solar Energy Society. Thousands of people across the country are expected to tour green homes in their own areas to see how neighbors are using clean energy and reducing fuel bills.

There are dozens of homes and buildings to visit around Maine, including at least 12 in the southern Maine communities between Kennebunkport, South Berwick and Freeport. Tours also will be offered at offices and educational buildings in the Portland area.

The Northeast Sustainable Energy Association, Energyworks LLC and the Maine Solar Energy Association are part of the effort and have posted information on open houses around the state.

Last week’s contentious three-day hearing on the Black Nubble Wind Farm proposal near Sugarloaf is still generating heat.

We wrote about the political tempest surrounding the testimony by Pamela Underhill, who oversees the Appalachian Trail for the National Park Service. She has been a star witness for opponents who say the wind farm would ruin the rare wilderness experience in the western mountains.

Her latest testimony only intensified the criticism of Underhill, and added a former ally to the critics who say she’s a loose cannon. Here’s a letter sent this week from the Natural Resources Council of Maine and the Conservation Law Foundation complaining to Underhill’s superiors about her statements.

The letter focuses on Underhill’s testimony that global warming is irrelevant to the decision about whether to open the door to development near the trail, and what sounded like a threat aimed at the Natural Resources Council for supporting the project. That Underhill said, was “not something we will forget anytime soon.”

They haven’t built a single windmill, but Maine’s newest wind entrepreneurs are joining the clean energy quest as near royalty.

Former Gov. Angus King and environmental activist Rob Gardiner have been quietly scouring the hills and mountains of Maine for the past several months, looking for suitable sites with steady winds.

Now, they’ve found what they want and gone public as new players in Maine’s emerging wind energy market.

“It’s a technology I’ve been interested in for a long time,” King said on Friday. “The time is right.”

Maine Mountain Power is expected to file its new plan Tuesday for a wind farm on Black Nubble Mountain near the Sugarloaf USA ski resort.

And, in turn, the Natural Resources Council of Maine and other advocacy groups are planning to announce their support for the project at a news conference in Portland Tuesday morning.

The Black Nubble wind farm is the scaled-down version of a plan that was effectively rejected by the Maine Land Use Regulation Commission because of impacts on sub-alpine wildlife habitat and views from the Appalachian Trail. The company resuscitated the plan by eliminating 16 turbines on the Redington Pond Range, and sticking with 18 turbines on Black Nubble.

The change, which includes a conservation agreement for Redington, has won over many of the plan’s critics. NRCM had even suggested the scaled-down Black Nubble plan early on, but the company said then that building only 18 turbines would be a money-losing proposition. The numbers look better now.

Two other wind farms are already pending before the commission. Commissioners will hold a public hearing Aug. 7 in Lee on a plan for 38 turbines on Stetson Ridge in northern Washington County. A hearing is expected in October on another plan for 44 turbines on Kibby Mountain in northern Franklin County.

For more in formation on the proposals, and to keep track, watch the LURC Website.

Wind power blew back into the headlines this week in Maine. And that means more soul searching for environmentalists.

Maine may have turned a corner this week in its effort to lead New England in the development of wind power.

First, Gov. John Baldacci decided to create a task force to come up with rules, laws and siting standards for attracting wind energy projects to the right places. And second, the company behind a doomed wind farm plan in the western Maine mountains resuscitated the project by scaling back from two mountain ridges to one and moving a couple miles farther away from the Appalachian Trail.

A state task force seemed inevitable ever since plans for 30 turbines on Redington and Black Nubble mountains were effectively rejected in January by the Land Use Regulation Commission. Opposition to the location of that project, as well as a smaller one in Freedom, left the governor and other wind fans looking for ways to get the state back on track and make potential wind developers feel more welcome.

Lawmakers responded with several of their own proposals to promote wind energy, including one to create statewide siting guidelines. Those bills have effectively been dropped to give the new task force time to do its job.

Baldacci’s move could put the state in front.

It turns out Maine is not alone and states across the country are experiencing the same difficulties attacting windmills. A new report by the National Research Council says that’s because states are inexperienced at wind power planning and regulation and often don’t have standards in place for where, and where not, to build them.

States hoping to break out of the holding pattern, the report says, must provide developers and the public with guidelines for planning and evaluating projects and for weighing the costs and benefits of proposals. The governor’s new task force is supposed to put together those kinds of recommendations by Jan. 15.

The decision to downscale the Redington and Black Nubble wind farm also seemed like an easy call.

The Maine Land Use Regulation Commission was expected to kill the project anyway at its meeting in Bangor June 6. Now, the commission will consider whether to give the developer time to change the plan or tell Maine Mountain Power to start over with a new application. Either way, the project will get new life and an improved prognosis.

It won’t get a free pass. The 18 remaining turbines will still be visible from the Appalachian Trail and could still affect birds and other wildlife. Those kinds of potential trade-offs will come with every wind energy plan.

The Black Nubble project, and two other large wind farm proposals before the Land Use Regulation Commission, are probably too far along to be affected by the new task force. But, in the long run, Baldacci’s new study group could help state agencies, local officials and the rest of us decide whether the trade-offs in each case are worth it.