Saving Maine from heating oil dependency
By: Lisa Gibson
Biomass Power & Thermal
With its sparse population in comparison with other states around it, Maine lacks the natural gas infrastructure employed in most areas. Largely because of that reality, the state has a serious and detrimental dependence on heating oil.
“It’s a unique and huge dependency,” says William Strauss, president of Maine-based consulting firm FutureMetrics. Strauss’s most recent paper, How to Cure Maine’s Addiction on Heating Oil: A roadmap to avoiding economic disaster in Maine and other regional states, laments the fact that $720 million will leave the state in 2011, to buy 300 million gallons of heating oil for its households. About 78 percent of every dollar spent on heating oil leaves the state’s economy, and more than 75 percent of households use No. 2 heating oil. Furthermore, if that money stayed in the state’s economy, it would create 41,000 new jobs…
