Waterpower is the Maine Thing

To begin, of all the hydropower generated in New England, 52.6% is in Maine. And there is more on the way! But what would seem like a perfect connection to all the hydropower needed to eliminate the use of fossil fuels in New England –isn’t yet open.

One problem, indigenous to New England is that petroleum use had grown over the years to the point where at least 60% of the energy use in New England was oil and another 13% or so was based on natural gas.

With reliance on the delivery of Mid-East oil to the area and a small amount of natural gas from Canada, it finally occurred to some independent “down-easterners” to get back to basics – Water power- the very energy form that got the area moving a few hundred years earlier.

The people who believed that while coal and oil can harm the ecology, felt it might be a good idea to bring in more natural gas to replace some of that energy. Never mind, said the independents, that close at hand was enough water power to solve all the local energy problems.
Well, let someone prove it, was the answer – and so they did.

A study made by several authorities indicated that there are thousands of Megawatts of potentially undeveloped hydropower projects in the state. Many of these are not suitable for electricity generation but hundreds of MW are.

Accordingly, there now exist 119 DEP hydropower projects in Maine as of January 1, 2009.These when completed will increase the Maine electricity production capacity by 201.6 MW to a total of 767.5 MW of electricity.

“All well and good,” said the naysayers, “but we are already getting oil and gas delivered to us. How do you get the hydropower here?”

And that’s a very good question, which raises another good question; “What about all that Canadian hydropower sitting just over the border?”

The answer, or course, is NOT blowing in the wind, but part of the Eastern North American Interconnect wherein a number of grid connections exist between Maine and (a) Quebec hydropower and (b) the Canadian Maritimes area hydropower.

For more details see Northeast Power Coordinating Council, Inc. reports (on the Internet as NPCC). While numbers and details will be included in a future update, suffice it to say for now that between the Maine and Canadian potentials, oil, gas and the small amount of coal consumed in Maine could be eliminated.