St. Maarten Private Eye

Biofuels 'crime against humanity' - 27th October 2007

Historic bill in Senate to fight warming - 19th October 2007

Biofuels switch a mistake, say researchers - 17th October 2007

No Choice But Green - 16th October 2007

Biofuels has started being a hype, atleast in Europe. Last week I read in the dutch papers that they are trying to stop a factory from producing Biofuels. Reason being it is a shortsighted solution, with the impact much more negative in the long run.

I hope more people realize that before governments start implying the use of biofuels for " restricting carbon emmisions". It is more harm than done.

Biofuels (like corn -don't ask me how..) are clean fuels, but it turns out that 'creating' biofuels (like corn crops) is very expensive and takes lots of time and energy. Therefore the outcome of the gain (namely clean energy) is often negative because it doesn't balance out all the unclean effort in creating the -for instance- corn crops.

But where biofuels aren't an option as a clean way of pruducing energy, there are many others. What about windenergy, waterenergy or, ofcoarse, solar-energy? Now is the time to invest in a durable and sustainable way of extracting energy from natural resources ON A LARGE SCALE that are ours to use. GEBE should be taking a lead in doing just that; sustainable, clean energy for the whole island.

We should of had solar energy for years now. What a perfect place to have it. We most likely have sunshine at least 320 days out of the year, and all of those empty hills would be perfect for wind mills to create energy. Many a people have made a fortune off of windmills that create energy years ago. Why are we so behind the times in using our God given brains!

It has been 5 years now almost to the day that I wrote a one page article for the Herald suggesting that St.Maarten look into using wind energy to lower it’s high energy costs. Back then I think oil was around $25.00 a barrel and forecasters were worried it might hit $45.00. Hard to believe that in only 5 short years $45.00 a barrel oil now seems like the good old days. In that five years I see that GEBE has spent 15 million for new engines to power their generators and Roy is talking about needing to spend another 30 million for additional generating capacity to meet future needs. He also states that generators need to be ordered right now because there is a 2-year lead-time required to obtain the equipment. I’ve got news for him, if he would do his job and investigate the uses of wind energy he would find that all the needed additional capacity and then some could be provided in less than 6 months. Here is a link to a site where a 30 MW wind farm came online start to finish within that time frame. http://www.fennerwind.com/index.html

As to the cost, there are several Dutch companies that have been investing heavily into wind power, both Shell and a company called Nuon comes to mind. Holland has already signed onto the Kyoto Protocol and is committed to reducing their output of greenhouse gasses so I’m sure there is money available for the development of a wind farm for St.Maarten but first you have to ask. With the wind resources that exist in St.Maarten and the unpredictability in future oil prices this would seem like a no-brainer to me. In addition to making sound financial sense you have the added benefit of not destroying the environment.