AUGUSTA, Maine — A University of Maine professor says electricity-generating wind farms off the state’s coast could provide 15,000 jobs in the next 20 years.
Engineering professor Habib Dagher says a $20 billion effort to build a wind farm 20 miles off shore would allow Maine to sell electricity to neighboring states and make the state less dependent on foreign oil.
Dagher made his comments at the university’s Augusta campus on Sunday as part of the Forum on the Future series.
The Kennebec Journal reported that Dagher said Maine families spend an average of $10,000 a year on energy. That includes of $4,000 on home heating oil, $5,000 to gas up their cars and $1,000 on electricity.
He says offshore wind would allow Maine residents to electric heat and electric cars.
Scam
The same old dog and pony show he’s given for years…this guy is all about keeping the grants and research funding going to his lab and that’s all. He’s just as much about his own bottom line as a greedy hedge fund manager and carries just about as much credibility when it comes to creating jobs.
Do you realize the cost of these is much more than would ever be recouped by the generation of this power? Only a society stuck on stupid would consider this instead of building natural gas fired powerplants and utilizing the huge amounts we have in this country.
Maine needs to offer a license plate with a sheep on it.
Except for the grants, sounds like what they told us back in 1945 when they were promoting the Quoddy Project. The bottom line for these people and these enterprises is money, money, money. Ten years ago I listened to a solar panel “expert” at the Legislature tell about how solar power was going to serve/solve Maine’s power needs. I’ve listened to all of this power BS for over 50 years and I am sick of it. My great grandfather survived quite nicely, as everyone else did when the only power available was manpower.
As an engineer, Dagher knows it
is a lot harder to make a living doing things of worth ,
in the private sector , than playing the politically correct green
scam game called Wind Power.
That is all this is , a pig flying, subsidy sucking , tax wasting, electrical cost escalating
SCAM by a self-server that would do more good for society by working
for a living, and balancing his check book like we all must do.
Mainers do not need their electrical rates skyrocketing
by this pipe-dream, when dense energy fossil fuels are abundant and much
less costly, even if the newest technologies are applied for extraction.
– When combined with resources from Canada and Mexico, the total recoverable
oil in North America exceeds 1.7 trillion barrels. That’s more than
the entire world has used in 150 years, and sufficient to fuel the
present needs in the United States for the next 250 years.
-In the last 30 years, the United States produced 77 billion barrels of
oil, which was more than 150 percent of the estimated reserves in
1980.
-The total amount of recoverable natural gas in North America is
approximately 4.2 quadrillion (4,244 trillion) cubic feet. That is
enough natural gas in North America to last for the next 175 years at
current rates of consumption.
– There is more recoverable natural gas in North America, Canada, and Mexico
than the combined proved reserves in Russia, Iran, Qatar, Saudi
Arabia, and Turkmenistan.
-North America has more than 497 billion short tons of recoverable coal, or
nearly three times as much as Russia, which has the world’s second
largest reserves. In fact, North America’s recoverable coal
resources are bigger than the five largest non-North American
countries’ reserves combined (Russia, China, Australia, India,
Ukraine.)
-A scarcity of good policies, not a scarcity of energy, is responsible
for U.S. energy insecurity.
Attached
PDF from:
http://energyforamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Energy-Inventory-FINAL.pdf