A Quick and (Mostly) Dirty History of New England’s Energy Supplies

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Recently we have come face to face with some of the hidden costs of our energy choices. The explosion on Deepwater Horizon rig and resulting oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico brought the true costs of offshore oil drilling into focus. Continued dependence on oil from an increasingly unstable Middle East makes us vulnerable to unpredictable spikes in price. The safety and dependability of nuclear power plants has undoubtedly been dealt a blow, at least temporarily, by the one-two punch of Japan's earthquake and tsunami that has crippled multiple nuclear reactors and threatened a vast area with a radioactive disaster. Natural gas development in the tight shale deposits under vast sections of this country is increasingly plagued with public fears about contamination from "hydro-fracking" techniques.

Meanwhile the effort to harness the region's winds as a component of the region's energy budget-onshore and off-has been hampered by view-shed concerns from those living on the shores of Cape Cod as well as other environmentalists in western Maine who want to protect the wilderness character of remote mountains, especially where views from the Appalachian Trail are concerned. The noises from turbines under certain wind conditions from neighbors within two or three thousand feet of a wind farm have raised other acute concerns that have been magnified by front page stories in the Maine Sunday Telegram, Boston Globe and New York Times and gone viral in the blogosphere where Wind Turbine Syndrome is an established fact to its denizens.

Here in New England, we all celebrate our traditions of rugged individualism, but protecting our individual needs and desires without any sense of what we require collectively is a recipe, if not for disaster, at least for paralysis, while the nation's energy policy is held hostage by our conflicting local interests-coal, nuclear, oil, natural gas and wind. Coal risks climate change; nuclear risks meltdowns; oil risks geopolitical instability; natural gas risks ground water pollution; wind risks view shed and noise intrusions. Someday soon we are going to have to make some real choices. You weigh the risks.

http://www.workingwaterfront.com/articles/Timber-Coal-Oil-and-Wind/14248/

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