Feeling a Bit Warmer, Fellow Frogs?
By Bill Nemitz
How does it feel to be a frog?
Not just any frog. We’re talking about the frog in a pot of water who doesn’t notice the temperature slowly but inexorably rising until suddenly the water starts to boil and …
“We’re dead,” said former Gov. Angus King.
King floated his metaphor before the University of Southern Maine’s monthly Corporate Partners breakfast last week. His warning: We Mainers adjust at our own peril to the steady upward creep in fossil fuel prices.
“This is a looming, impending, rolling catastrophe,” King told the packed room at USM. “We’re in the cross hairs of a disaster.”
It was the former governor’s second public pitch in as many months for what many might still call a radical idea – a 5,000- megawatt wind farm sucking up the ocean winds 25 miles out into the Gulf of Maine.
King focused not only on why such a massive endeavor makes sense – but also why paying ever-increasing cost for oil and gas to heat our homes and power our cars doesn’t.
Noting that forecasts of crude oil prices are consistently falling short of reality, King foresees an energy crisis so severe that within the next dozen years (or less) “Maine essentially will become uninhabitable.”
Think he’s kidding?
Picture paying $2,000 to fill your home heating oil tank. Or $200 to fill up your car. At $300 per barrel for crude – “a reasonable expectation by knowledgeable people studying the oil market,” King said – those nightmares could come true.
The wind proposal – 1,000 five-megawatt windmills on floating platforms, not visible from the coast, covering a mere 1 percent of the Gulf of Maine – has far to go before the juice starts flowing.
Two existing technologies – on-land wind power and floating platforms now used (ironically) to drill for oil – must be married to handle the extremes of winter in the gulf.
At the same time, Maine (and the rest of the country, for that matter) must replace its oil furnaces and gas-guzzling autos with electric-powered heat pumps and plug-in cars.
“In other words, no more oil,” King said. “No more oil.”
Sounds crazy? No crazier than what we do now, King said:
“If I came to you today and said I want to develop an energy source for Maine that will require thousands of trucks, highways, bridges, storage and, by the way, this stuff is flammable and pollutes the ground if it gets out, you’d say, ‘Oh, wow. Are you crazy? That’s the last thing we need.’ Well, that’s the system we’ve got.”
Juxtapose that with the world-class breeze blanketing the Gulf of Maine – King’s calls it “the Saudi Arabia of wind” – and an overhaul of how we produce and consume energy doesn’t seem quite so far out there.
King said it’s too soon to tell how the $15 billion-to-$20 billion project (“Six weeks in Iraq,” he noted) might take shape. He said it might be modeled after the Tennessee Valley Authority, which produces 33,000 megawatts of clean hydropower and over the past half century has melted into the national landscape.
“This is going to happen somewhere, folks,” said King, motioning toward his PowerPoint slide showing the priceless winds that blow strong and steady off much of the Eastern Seaboard. “It ought to be here.”
Meaning, fellow frogs, it’s time to start hopping.
Columnist Bill Nemitz can be contacted at 791-6323 or at:
bnemitz@pressherald.com
Originally published by by Bill Nemitz staff columnist.
(c) 2008 Portland Press Herald. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.