Since 1990, Maine has cut coal by 44%, raised reliance on gas by 223%

[NNadir]

In 1990, Maine obtained just 0.3% of its electricity from natural gas. As of 2004, 51% of its electricity from natural gas.

A great deal is made in some circles about Maine's vast renewable resources - primarily it's wood.

The figures say that Maine has made very little progress in this area in 14 years. In fact the second best year for Maine in production of renewable energy other than hydroelectricity was 1991, when it produced 4.2 million kilowatt-hours of electricity via renewable means. Most years in that period fell below 4.0 million kilowatt-hours, but in 2002, Maine set its all time record for renewable production, probably burning wood, reaching 4.4 million kilowatt-hours. Overall the percentage of renewable electricity production in Maine fell from 1990 to 2004, from 21.4% to 20.4%

In 1990 Maine relied on fossil fuels for only 22.5% of it's electricity. As of 2004, it relied on fossil fuels for 60.2% of it's electricity.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/st_profiles/sept05me.xls

I really think that Maine needs to get a poultry industry, a horse industry, and a cattle industry so it can have more chickenshit, horseshit, and bullshit to provide biological natural gas from cute digesters.

The rest of the nation uses far less renewable energy than Maine. Overall, in 2005, the United States received 2.34% of its electricity from renewable schemes other than hydro, slightly less (2.36%) than it generated in 1994. Even though the rest of the country generates, in percentage terms, about 18% less electricity than Maine, it relies on fossil fuels to generate 72% of its electricity, about 12% more than Maine.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epaxlfilees1.xls

Here's a picture for those who are easily confused by words and numbers:



I am still hearing wonderful things about the growth of renewable energy in this country, how it is wiping out climate change and securing the future. For some reason though, I am hardly comforted by any of this. I keep thinking there's a problem. Somebody somewhere is having a hallucination. If it me, my hallucination is unpleasant. If it is someone else who is having a hallucination, one hopes at least it's pleasant, even if it kills ultimately.

[pooja]

1. and the boooming population of maine is.....

Seriously, a lot of homes are heated by woodstove... The electricity they are using is for general lighting purposes. And most of the population live along the coast. and A/C's are very rare.

VT would have similar stats if it wasn't for receiving nuclear energy.

[NNadir]

2. Yes, I've heard that. Some Democrats in Maine complain about wood heat.

Here is what these Maine Democrats say:

In an attempt to save money on heating bills this winter, hundreds more Mainers are expected to install wood-fired boilers. Boilers heat water in a reservoir, which is pumped through underground pipes and circulated through a home’s heating system. Oxygen to the fire is cut off when the desired temperature is reached, leaving the wood to smolder.

Boilers go through a lot of wood and tend to belch soot and smoke like Old Faithful. That smoke tends to hang near the ground, drifting through nearby yards.

The end result is sore throats, burning eyes, hacking coughs and colds for your neighbors and more pollution in the air. In fact, the average wood boiler emits more than 70 grams of particle pollution per hour - 15 times the federal standard for other wood stoves, according to the American Lung Association of Maine, but there are no federal regulations concerning emissions from wood boilers.

http://mainedemocrats.org/category/heating-home/

Not all Maine Democrats use electricity only for lighting. The pictured cat, apparently a Maine Democrat since he is featured on the blog linked above, is using electricity for his or her computer.

[Davis_X_Machina]

3. There was a fair amount invested...

...in biomass in the '80's, especially in commercial co-generation, and there was legislation at the time requiring/encouraging the power company to take electricity from those sources on long-term contracts.

When the price of oil plummeted in the '90's, the spike at the time of the first Gulf War aside, the power companies bought out those contracts, or broke them, dumping considerable biomass capacity at the same time that Canadian gas became available through the new pipeline. And this happened just as the deregulation of the electricity business and the sale of CMP.

The market in electrical generation isn't that nimble. It's relatively easy to switch from one fossil fuel to another. Wood requires capital investment, and capital investment requires a regulatory and cost environment that makes predicting future returns possible

So long as the Sable Island gas wells keep producing, you won't see much change except at the margins.

[NNadir]

4. Well, as long as we don't trouble ourselves thinking about the environment,

I guess it's OK with me.

I looked into that Sable Island field and found this cool graphic, provided by some "peak oil" types:

The curious thing about this diagram is the use of a new colour to show the effect of compression. No new field is involved, so all that compression should do is increase deliverablity, at the expense of more rapid depletion of the reservoirs. It cannot delay output decline indefinitely, and the diagram shows beginnings of decline in late 2008. One would expect that the total output (over all time) would scarcely be affected by compression, so a very rapid decline would be expected after 2008. It is difficult to see how a decline of the output to a very low level can be avoided by the end of the decade or shortly after. In spite of this, one report on Rolls Royce's involvement in the project implies that 25 years' further output is expected.

The "peak oilers" skepticism aside, it would seem - if you believe the "corporate types" - Maine can continue burning natural gas for another 25 years. I may not live to see the outbreak of the grand renewable future in Maine when everything is powered by wind, wood and solar.

[4dsc]

7. REad the whole report

If you have read the whole report over at the oildrum.com you'd find that they believe compresson in the Sable Island field will only bring about 10 years of gas.. But you didn't want to report that for some reason...

[NNadir]

8. I really don't care. I would love Sable Island to be shut now, for environmental

reasons. I don't give a flying fuck about how long it can be made to operate. It makes no difference to me whatsoever.

I generally avoid websites like Oildrum, since they have a fetish about oil that makes oil (and natural gas) seem essential to survival. I don't agree with that outlook, which makes me nearly nauseous, at all. I think that the use of oil and gas does not keep life going so much as to make its continuance unlikely.

I oppose all fossil fuel use. I think I've made that pretty clear. If we announced the intentional policy of phasing out oil, gas and coal next week, I would support it ethusiastically. I believe that unlike other energy phase-outs, the phase out of fossil fuels is technically feasible. It's not likely to be cheap nor necessarily easy, but it is feasible.

[4dsc]

13. A fetish??

SInce when is the oildrum considered a fetish?? More information than you care to know about peak oil and many other oil related topics are discussed over there.. There isn't another peak oil web site that comes close..

And at this time, gas and oil are essential to our lives.. Its essential to the lives of billions of people.. Without oil and gas we have www.DIEOFF.com

[NNadir]

14. The statement that oil and gas are essential is a fetishistic statement.

It is not true. The sooner these fuels are banned the better it will be for the survivability of this planet.

You keep saying that without oil and gas there will be a die off, while insisting that oil and gas will cease to exist. Meanwhile you do nothing but worry about oil and gas. All in fact that you are doing is predicting a die-off. This is a useless activity.

Not one person with the "peak oil" fetish - James Kunstler included - has announced an intention to kill themselves to avoid the die-off rush.

It is purely absurd. The chemistry of oil and gas and coal is well understood and the technology for replacing them has been available for decades. We live in the Golden age of chemistry. The main point of insistence really extends to the fact that the external cost of oil and gas and coal are ignored. The other factor is that people seem to believe that the price of energy should be so low as to allow for orgiastic excess. Witness, for instance, the number of people who cry when oil exceeds $3.00/gallon. I've got news for you. If the external cost of oil were really calculated, it would be so expensive that everyone would find a way to do what is well within the realm of technological feasibility, replace oil.

The price of oil, to my mind, should be tripled, if not quadrupled. I cannot hide my pleasure at the thought that oil will - the bizarre fetishes to the contrary notwithstanding - run out.

To get a measure of the external costs - limiting oneself to just one odious side effect of the bizarre oil fetish let us say that the war in Iraq costs $100 billion dollars a year. Mind you, I am not talking about the loss of people killed and infrastructure destroyed but am only speaking of the money spent to provide the weapons and people to commit the murder.

As of this week the United States was importing 12,755,000 barrels of oil per day.

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_wkly_dc_NUS-Z00_mbblpd_w.htm

This annualizes to 4,700,000,000 barrels per year. This means that the cost of carrying out the act of murder alone adds $21/barrel to the cost. If one adds the cost of climate change, air pollution, water pollution, etc, the matter is much, much, much, much worse.

The question of whether a bunch of moral morons sit around and cry about the fact that oil might become too expensive is thus on some level, purely sick. Oil is not too expensive. It is too cheap. Paying the real price of oil would quickly lead to it being effectively banned and replaced, something I spend a part of every single day hoping will happen.

[applegrove]

5. Way to go Maine!

[NNadir]

6. I agree. It's important that we increase dependence on fossil fuels.

We should also make speeches about how we are doing the opposite by using clean, safe renewable energy.

These days, doublespeak is to be preferred to reality.

[kestrel91316]

9. Everybody repeat after me: renewables cannot solve ALL

our energy problems, therefore they are useless and should NEVER be used. At all. Just fire up more nukes and let our grandchildren figure out WTF to do with the waste.

:sarcasm:

[NNadir]

10. Repeat after me. Renewable energy cannot solve MUCH of our

energy problems, so just pretend that carbon dioxide isn't eternal waste. Let's just keep building new fossil fuel plants while talking about what renewable energy could do - even if it actually does next to zero.

In the case of nukes, by the way, our grandchildren need do very little figuring, since the problem already has a technically developed solution that is relatively trivial. In fact, in spite of what you see on TV, so called "nuclear waste" is the only form of energy for which a technical solution is possible at all.

Actually - as opposed to the many billions of tons of fossil fuel waste - so called "nuclear waste" isn't much of a problem that needs to be addressed, since zero people in the US have actually been killed by storing so called "nuclear waste," but given the general level of education in this country, you certainly wouldn't know that. In fact, the de facto "solution" is one of which I approve in concept - keep the spent fuel at the plant (or other above ground accessible facility) until it is needed. Unlike a fossil fuel plant it has been industrially demonstrated over 50 years of industrial practice that this is not only possible, but well, so far it's been completely harmless.

The only form of waste that people seem to understand the existence of is so called "nuclear waste." This is not a reflection of wisdom, of course, but is an expression instead of complete stupidity.

[mainegreen]

11. No! No poultry industry! We just got rid of it!

I don't want it back! :P

Seriously, I have mixed feelings about the drop in hydroelectric. I'm sure some of that is caused by the dramatic number of mills that have closed, which often ran dams that provided a surplus of electricity. But then, I really don't consider damming a river particularly 'environmentally friendly' either.

It's been interesting watching the power of the natural gas lobby rising out of nowhere in this state over the last ten years. Just the LNG Terminal fights alone has been extremely crazy.

It will be interesting to see what happens over the next five years. Maine looks like it may be set to become even bigger of a petrochemical distribution center than it already is, which I'm sure will only increase the power of those lobbies up in Augusta.

[NNadir]

12. You have failed to recognize the value of chickenshit.

You have to do chickenshit right of course.

It is reported in various places that Maine is about to go 100% renewable. I'm surprised therefore that you would need gas terminals up there. This wouldn't be happening if you would just see the light about chickenshit digesters, horseshit digesters, bullshit digesters, cowshit digesters and shit digesters.

Can't someone get all the talk about gas terminals, etc, to go away by talking about wind power, hydrogen, and the like? That is, after all, how Maine got its nuclear power plant to go away, by talking about wind, solar and biomass.

I would like to suggest that if you place a wind turbine in front of the face of a person talking loudly about what wind will do someday, you will generate renewable energy powered only by biomass heated air.