Lincoln, Maine, New possible business

The Poland Springs company just signed a new contract with the Lincoln Water District to extract upto 175 million gallons of water per year. I don't know what this translates into various bottles of water, but it could lead to a new facility being built in Lincoln. I know there was access to the paper mill that was in Lincoln and since they are in the rebuilding stage of the the branch to the Keag can this possibly be the start of something. Currently, I beileive they are trucking water from Lincoln to the PS bottling plant but who knows what can happen.

Here we go again. Maybe this one will actually happen. BDN today has an article about changing the old paper mill site into a large energy storage facility. What ever that means, but the article says that if built this location will be the largest energy storeage facility in the US. I would assume that this will be related to electric energy storage. If this does happen, it should generate alot of traffic bringing in transformers and other related support products. Who knows if this will ever happen. I am sure the good people of LIncoln are hoping that this one comes true.

This would produce very little, if any, rail traffic. I guess its possible there could be some one off moves for construction materials but it seems unlikely.

It makes sense however, Lincoln is well situated along major Tranmission and Generator cooridors and the former mill site has little use for anything else. My guess too is the remediation costs were a key point for someone like Poland Springs in building a new plant.

Lastly 85MW storage is not even close to a world record, the PPH need to do some research or talk to someone who actually works in the industry.

EDIT ** It appears that they were referring to the entirety of this project called "Power up New England" so that is true-- a 4800MW in totality it is certainly a massive and world-scale size wise. The Lincoln specific piece however is only a small portion of the entire project.

Water is already being trucked from Lincoln a new plant would depend on how many trucks it would take to move it. I think the PS trailers are 12,000 gallons which is 14,500 truck loads a year or 40 truck loads a day. Realisticlly you could do two trips to Kingfield per day, so 20 trucks need to be hired That would really be the factor which decides if a plant will be built or not. The redevelopment at the mill is probably another redevelopment pipe dream. It will end up like the biorefinery or the timber mill which have been talked about before. The only real traffic source would be scrap steel they left a lot of equipment in place after the auction because you would have to tear down the whole mill to get to it and no one wanted to pay for that.

Electric storage, today, they are talking about an industrial park filled with containers with lithium ion batteries. Very few jobs very little traffic lots of property tax revenue. Perfect unless there is a fire, then you end up with hydrogen flouride and hydroflouric acid. Very dangerous for humans and probably very bad for any aquifer.

There is a thermal storage concept that is interesting, promises lower costs and greater safety.