“Catastrophe” Awaits Maine ~ Doing nothing is not an option

http://ellsworthmaine.com Written by Tom Walsh, Jun 19th

This is a human catastrophe coming at us in the state of Maine in terms of energy supply and costs,” King said last week at a daylong seminar on harnessing tidal energy and offshore wind to confront runaway energy costs, costs he sees as a direct threat to Maine being habitable.

“This winter, the cost of fuel oil is going to more than double,” he said. “What’s being quoted now is $4.96 — $5 a gallon. That’s $1,000 to fill up your tank in the basement one time, and most people are going to have to fill up their tank six times.

“How is somebody who is making $350 or $400 a week going to pay to fill up the tank to keep warm? How are they going to pay to fill up the truck to get to work? This is, I think, the most serious crisis to ever face the state of Maine.”

Tapping the energy of coastal Maine’s offshore winds will require development of wind turbines not unlike those phased into use last fall six miles off the coast of Liverpool, England. The Burbo Bank Offshore Wind Farm uses 25 turbines, each standing 459 feet above the Irish Sea, to generate enough electricity to power 80,000 homes.—PHOTO COURTESY OF NATIONAL RENEWABLE ENERGY LABORATORIES

King told an audience of 120 state, regional and national experts on alternative energy concepts that the time for talk is over and that solutions need to be found and implemented. An investor in an onshore wind farm in western Maine, King said the greatest and most reliable source of wind energy is in deep water, some 25 miles offshore. Although the technology for harnessing that wind energy has yet to be developed outside of Europe, it better be soon, he warned.

“This is a catastrophe,” he said. “This isn’t business as usual. This isn’t some minor little problem. This isn’t do not pass school buses or what’s the speed limit on the Interstate. This is a disaster in the state of Maine that’s coming at us.”

“Eighty percent of homes in Maine are heated with oil,” he said. “The national average is 9 percent. If you do the math, 87 percent of the total energy bill of the average Maine person is dependent on oil or natural gas, and that is a particularly serious problem.”

King notes that oil prices have more than tripled in the last 10 years. Only six months ago, he said, the price of oil was $75 a barrel. Last week it was $114.

“A non-hysterical prediction is that, by 2020, oil will be $300 a barrel, which means $10 a gallon for gasoline, which means $10 a gallon fuel oil. It means filling up the tank in your car will be $200, with incomes not that different. It means $2,000 to fill the oil tank in the basement.

“Here’s the catastrophe part,” he said at Bowdoin College. “In 1998, energy — all energy: cars, home heating and electricity — was 4 percent of the average Maine family’s budget. Today it’s 20 percent. It went from 4 percent to 20 percent in 10 years. That’s pain.”

Should oil hit $300 a barrel, King said, that percentage would increase from 20 percent to as much as 50 percent of the average family budget.

“We go from pain to lethal,” he said. “We simply can’t survive that. This state and this country are not viable at that level of energy costs. If this happens, it’s all over. We won’t have an election for governor in 2020; we’ll have an election for chief park ranger, because that’s all this state will be, a large park of some kind that is largely uninhabitable.

“Fifty percent of your budget for energy and 20 percent for health care leaves 30 percent for everything else: mortgage, rent, food. It’s just absolutely unsustainable.”

King predicted in Northport that $300 oil would see families pulling up stakes and dramatically changing how they live.

“The old thing we heard was people choosing between medicine and food,” he said. “People are going to be choosing between heat and food. People are going to be living together. People are going to be moving in to have five or 10 people in an apartment to deal with this problem.

“This is a really urgent problem, and I don’t think the world has come to grips with how serious.”

Doing nothing is not an option, King said.