The International Passamaquoddy Tidal Power Project

July 3rd, 2007

“Man needs only to exercise his engineering ingenuity to convert the ocean’s surge into a great national asset.”

—John F. Kennedy, July 16th, 1963

“Touch one, you’ve touched them all… All these secrets are the same secret.”

—Daniel Hopsicker, Barry & ‘The Boys’

The energy scarcity scam is one of those scams that, once you sink your teeth into the thing, it’s absolutely astonishing where it takes you, if, of course, you’re brave enough to hold on.

Here we are again, in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.

But let’s back up a few months.

President John F. Kennedy, Remarks in Response to a Report on the Passamaquoddy Tidal Power Project, July 16th, 1963:

I AM pleased to meet today with Members of the Senate and the House of Representatives from New England to discuss the report on the International Passamaquoddy Tidal Project submitted by Secretary Udall. Two years ago, I asked Secretary Udall, in cooperation with the Corps of Engineers, to restudy the proposed project, and the hydroelectric potential of the St. John River in Maine to determine whether recent developments in electric power technology had enhanced the economic feasibility of these projects.

This report has been presented to me this morning, and its major conclusions are most encouraging. The report reveals that this unique international power complex can provide American and Canadian markets with over a million kilowatts for the daily peak period in addition to 250,000 kilowatts of firm power. Electric power rates in the New England region are among the highest in the United States, and the survey indicates that a massive block of power can be produced and delivered at a cost of about 4 mills, approximately 25 percent below the current wholesale cost of power in the region.

I am pleased to note also that the development plan proposed would preserve the superb recreational areas of the Allagash River from flooding, and that an area suitable for a new national park would be preserved in this scenic part of Maine.

Any proposed resource development project must, of course, meet the national interest test. It must strengthen the economy of the whole country and enable America to compete better in the market places of the world. I understand that, measured by the customary feasibility standards, the Passamaquoddy-St. John project now meets the national interest test.

During the last three decades American taxpayers, through their Federal Government, have invested vast sums of money in developing the water resources of the great rivers of this country–the Columbia, the Missouri, the Colorado, the Tennessee, and others. These investments are producing daily dividends for our country, and it is reasonable to assume that a similar investment in conserving the resources of New England will also benefit the Nation. It is also reasonable to assume that a New England development will stimulate more diversified industry, increase commerce, and provide more jobs.

Our experience in other regions and river valleys shows that private utility customers as well as public agency power users benefit from lowering the basic cost of electric energy.

Harnessing the energy of the tides is an exciting technological undertaking. France and the Soviet Union are already doing pioneering work in this field. Each day, over a million kilowatts of power surge in and out of the Passamaquoddy Bay. Man needs only to exercise his engineering ingenuity to convert the ocean’s surge into a great national asset. It is clear, however, that any development of this magnitude and new approach must also be considered in the context of the National Energy Study currently being undertaken by an interdepartmental committee under the chairmanship of the Director of the Office of Science and Technology, Dr. Wiesner.

These projects involve international waters, and equitable agreements must therefore be reached with the Canadian Government. Therefore, I am requesting the Secretary of State to initiate negotiations immediately with the Government of Canada looking toward a satisfactory arrangement for the sharing of the benefits of these two projects. Also, to insure full consideration of these proposals, I am directing that the Interior Department and the Corps of Engineers accelerate their work on the remaining studies of details.

The power-producing utilities of the United States are second to none in the world. The combined effort of science, private industry, and Government will surely keep this Nation in the forefront of technological progress in energy and electric power.

I think that this can be one of the most astonishing and beneficial joint enterprises that the people of the United States have ever undertaken and, therefore, I want to commend the Department of the Interior for its initiative in working on this matter the past 2 years, the congressional delegation from Maine which has been interested in this for many years, and the Members of Congress from New England who have supported this great effort. I think it will mean a good deal to New England and a good deal to the country.

Note: The President spoke at 10 a.m. in the Flower Garden at the White House. The text of brief remarks by Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall and Senators Margaret Chase Smith and Edmund S. Muskie of Maine was also released.

The report (93 pp.) is dated July 1963 and entitled “The International Passamaquoddy Tidal Power Project and Upper Saint John River Hydroelectric Power Development.” A 24-page “Summary Report” was also released.

For the President’s request for a restudy of the project, see 1961 volume, this series, Item 197.

If you can track this down, it would make for some interesting reading.

The international Passamaquoddy tidal power project and Upper Saint John River hydroelectric power development.
Report to President John F. Kennedy in response to a letter of May 20, 1961.
Passamaquoddy-Saint John River Study Committee.
1963
United States

Related: Dream of Passamaquoddy

14 Responses to “The International Passamaquoddy Tidal Power Project”

  1. Cherenkov says:

    The problem with any project that maintains the status quo in energy, that is cheap energy that allows expensive growth, is the knock-on effects. Our basic problem is overpopulation. We passed the carrying capacity of 2 billion people when we started exploiting cheap energy, coal, oil, and gas. In 1950 we were 2.5 billion. Today we are over 6.5 billion. The question is what other resources are necessary, other than energy, to support our over-extended population? Well, the oceans, which are dying due to our population. Ocean life has crashed to such an extent that primordial life not seen in any significant numbers for 500 million years are making a comeback. We need land, for food. Grain stocks are falling to levels unheard of. We need clean water. Water was declared to be at emergency levels by the UN. We need unpolluted environments. Plastics have infested every corner of the world creating hormone mimics which are destroying ocean life at its most fundamental, the plankton of the sea.

    Will more energy help these situations? No. It will produce more people, more pollution, destroy more land, air and water, and ultimately create an even larger population that will die off resulting in a that planet may not be left inhabitable for humans at all.

    More energy is the wrong answer no matter what. You must think holistically and not myopticotechnically.

  2. Kevin says:

    @Cherenkov

    Get a clue before trying to lecture me:

    https://cryptogon.com/?p=846

    The point is that energy scarcity is an engineered crisis, and, regardless of what you or anyone else says “we need” we’re going to get killed off by the people who created this mess.

  3. cryingfreeman says:

    So Cherenkov, what do you propose? A mass culling of the global population?

  4. qd says:

    Slightly off-topic, but I also get the same reaction when I risk having conversations with people regarding global warming & climate change. When I put forward my view that most (all?) of the “solutions” proposed by our leaders are mainly a bunch of bullshit and not intended to really fundamentally change anything anyway, I get cut off and accused of hating the earth, etc. and that maybe I should get a clue and watch An Inconvenient Truth or some other slickly produced “documentary” – as if that contains all of the answers. Sadly, most people I know who have watched that feature film really do think that insisting that his/her boss pay a “voluntary fine” to some big friendly organization each time they rack up some more frequent-flyer points will ensure that everything will be just peachy. Nice and convenient-like. The concept of enough is just so far below most people’s level of thinking…

    @ Cherenkov – if you have a cursory glance at even the titles of previous posts on this site, you’ll see that Kevin is only illustrating that it’s all bullshit. There’s a difference between that and promoting growth.

  5. Cherenkov says:

    The planet will take care of itself. Whatever I propose will be either assailed for being too draconian or not draconian enough. The technofetishists will always believe in the “next big thing.” They will tout this or that technofix promising it will buy us more time. What they say may be true, but the result is the same — more people. And more people will mean an even mightier crash.

    You ask, “What do I propose? A mass culling?”

    I ask, “What do you propose? Kill even more people by inducing more population on a planet not big enough for those we have?”

    I made my suggestions. Population control. If you want some sort of concrete mechanism, I suggest quite simply a lottery conducted at every hospital in the world. At random, new births are to be sterilized at whatever level would best fit a scaling back pace. To sterilize all babies would cause problems, obviously. To sterilize too few would clearly have its problems. The random quality would ensure that the gene pool would maintain randomness.

    You will, of course, ask about third world countries without hospitals, and I would answer, why worry about them? They are participating in their own natural cycles of boom and bust.

    Will this work? Of course not. People are too greedy, too self-centered, too hung up on the illusion of freedom created for our benefit to see this as being anything other than a challenge to their “freedom” to do whatever the hell they want.

    So be it. Down goes the population through natural culling. Down goes the planet as a habitat. Down goes the species as a footnote in the long history of extinct species.

    Buh bye.

    Meanwhile, Joe Blow, cries and whines in utter infantile rage at me, asking if I would want to kill off the population. Use your brain!! Think!!! Why is we are really good at thinking of ways to grow the population and destroy the planet, yet we suck at finding ways to control the population and save the planet? Why?

    Because of the red herrings thrown out to confuse the basic physics of the issue.

    The planet, the ecosphere could care less about your political mooings. It is total sheeplespeak.

    I guess in your view, as long as we have the right to screw, who cares if it all goes down the tubes.

    Wooosh, says the earth, now a giant toilet.

  6. Alek Hidell says:

    Well, the energy dimensions of the world problem were well understood in the late 1950s. For a quarter century there was an elite struggle between elite followers of the technocrats (Hubbert, Rickhover, Bonner) who wanted to engineer a transition to a renewable energy economy and the entrenched fossil hydrocarbon interests. The conflict ended in 1980 with total victory for the hydrocarbon interests. One could say that the current crisis situation was engineered by that outcome 27 years ago. There is a good argument to be made that better decisions circa 1980 – electric rail instead of cars, trucks, and jets, new urbanism instead of suburban sprawl, subsidies for renewable power – could have averted much of the crisis.

    However, the current rulers do not have any further choice in the matter. The 2007 economy is a 15 terawatt 86% fossil fueled machine running 24/7. Even if Jimmy Carter came back as planetary dictator, it is much too late to have a smooth transition away from fossil fuels. There is no way to grow the 14% share of non-fossil power at the rate the fossil share will be shrinking. You can’t solve terawatt problems with megawatt solutions.

    The International Passamaquoddy Tidal Project’s 250,000 kilowatts of ‘firm’ (baseload) power sound like a lot. Indeed, that translates to 250 megawatts. It would be brilliant to have one of those tidal projects in Northland (although Kiwis chose to invest in overpriced leaky suburban houses instead of essential infrastructure). But in terms of current world power, it is only 1/60,000th of the total. There aren’t that many good tidal bays in the world.

    And jets don’t run on electricity or electrically generated hydrogen or biofuels yet. A British study calculated that even if the entire British offshore area was saturated with giant wind turbines to make hydrogen, it would only support 10% of current British aviation activity. Likewise, maximum possible British biomass production potential could only support 10% of British aviation.

    My point being, the present crisis was inevitable due to greedy shortsighted stupidites committed a generation ago. There is no alt.energy technofix large enough to save the current world economy being withheld by the PTB. There will be a population cull by design or a dieoff by chaos or most likely both. I would not be surprised to see French revolutionary justice meted out to the PTB when the masses understand how screwed they are. And that is exactly what the elites fear. Hence Blackwater et.al.

  7. Big Gav says:

    On the subject of population, I hesitate to quote the Club Of Rome here lest I get labelled a “clean green fascist”, but if you actually read the most recent version of “Limits To Growth”, the scenario they actually advocate “scenario 9” (as opposed to the overshoot and collapse scenarios they warn against), has a world with population levelling out between 8 and 9 billion people with a standard of living higher than the present day.

    The book says this scenario can still come true if we make a big push to put in place sustainable energy generation and industrial processes, and gives us until 2020 to start making real progress on this.

    If you look at the child organisations of the Club Of Rome (the next wave of scenario modellers like the Global Business Network), you’ll see that key people like Stewart Brand argue that present population trends show we will actually level out around 9 billion people – which means we can safely avoid going into overshoot if we choose to.

    http://www.google.com/search?q=stewart+brand+population

    Maybe I’ve got the wrong end of the stick here but I can’t see where all the theories about the COR being behind a depopulation agenda get their credibility from (though there are certainly other people out there advocating depopulation – I just can’t find any evidence that any COR publications advocate this as a course of action).

    As always, apologies for being a troll.

    I will agree with Kevin that the energy crisis is a crock – there is more renewable energy out there than we can ever use – we just need to choose to do so.

    On the topic of generating capacity from Passamaquoddy and other tidal areas, 250 MW seems like a gross underestimate of the potential there – read these sections from the original article a little more closely (it doesn’t sound entirely reliable, but if you look at the size of recent tidal projects in Scotland and Northern Ireland, plus planned projects in Eastern Siberia, there does seem to be the potential for truly massive tidal power generation capacity):

    We do not need oil, coal, or gas; we never did. Blue Energy’s estimate of 200,000 megawatts of ocean power available from the lower North American continent, is far below the French study’s estimate of 3307 Gwh from the Passamaquoddy and Fundy area alone. The United States and Canada have used only 2% of their fresh water capabilities. You will read in some articles that the technology for ocean power is new, or new advances have been made that now make it more feasible. Wave power is new; the geothermal use of ocean heat is newer, but none of this is true about tidal power technology. The President of the United States, George Bush, agrees. On November 1, 2006, he cut off government funding for hydropower research with the statement that it was a well-established technology, which did not need any money for research. He is right. Reinventing the turbine is like reinventing the wheel. Once you have the basics you can only add bells and whistles.

    There was a small story in the Miami Herald ,in the spring of 2005, about a former oil company executive who was trialing turbines in Florida’s Gulf Stream. Conveniently and quietly, without a peep, the state of Florida had passed a law extending its water boundary from three miles out to twelve miles in the Gulf Stream, thus allowing turbines to be put in the Gulf Stream under Florida’s control. Another company, Vendant Power, is trialing turbines in the 9-knot East River in Manhattan. A company with Miami offices is applying to the Federal Energy Commission for permission to put “not yet commercially available turbines” in the waters of John Kennedy’s Passamaquoddy Bay. …

    By the time I got to the La Rance history, I already knew that Gibrat really wanted to start with the waters off the famous Mont St. Michele, because it had a good deal more capacity. But what I leaned now is that the La Rance plan Gibrat was allowed to implement at 240 megawatts represented only 18% of the total capacity in the La Rance channel; it was a prototype dam. The dam at La Rance was not a two-pool plan like the Kennedy plan, but it did use turbines that were capable of capturing the surge from the ocean and the reverse flow from the river when the tides ran out. Initially, La Rance used both, but the turbines were relegated to one-way use until 1982. Then they were used both ways, and now have been restrained again.

    A report received from France, written in English, states unequivocally, the potential of Mont Saint Michele as 60 million times the potential of La Rance.

  8. cryingfreeman says:

    Cherenkov, first of all, there’s no need to resort to puerile insults. You might as well call me Mr Poopy Pants!

    The globalists are no doubt delighted that so many people who oppose them (at least, I suspect you do) have actually bought into their population control mantra – I posed the question to you specifically to highlight that point.

    If the world’s population were halved overnight, do you really believe the planet would be healthier? Huge corporations would still be doing their utmost to plunder and pillage and wreak misery, and every badness that exists now would still exist, because there would be no change in the attitude of the bulk of humanity towards wealth and how to obtain it.

    I absolutely don’t agree that the planet isn’t big enough, or doesn’t have enough resources, etc for its current and projected populations. Granted, there are too many huge cities, too much wastefulness, too much wealth hoarding, too much debt, and many other evils wilfully crafted by those whose god is money, but the world doesn’t have to be like that. And the great thing is, change doesn’t have to begin at governmental level, as you seem to demand. Rather, the individual can do something about it him or herself, by reducing reliance on money, establishing as high a degree of self-sufficiency, etc. It’s all about education as to “the better way”.

  9. fallout11 says:

    Excellent posts Cherenkov, as always.

  10. cryingfreeman says:

    @fallout11, would you be saying that if you were in line to be neutered yourself? I’m shocked Cherenkov wasn’t advocating the abolition of the orgasm and the establishment of an anti-sex league.

  11. fallout11 says:

    @Cryingfreeman, we have no children, nor any desire to have any. Sex and childbirth are not one and the same. In fact, birth control has been practiced since the beginning of recorded history.

    When you think about it clinically, it is really no different than pet population control. Help prevent unwanted mouths to feed….have your kids spayed or neutered.
    China figured it out. India didn’t. Look at the difference.

  12. cryingfreeman says:

    @fallout11, voluntary birth control may be fine but compulsory birth control is unquestionably a work of tyranny, and an unnecessary one at that, given that the world doesn’t have to be that way, as explained in a previous post of mine above.

    It’s just as well you don’t want any kids if you can liken children to mere animals. It’s very much the same way the corporate elites view humanity at large, i.e., cattle to be tagged, chipped, bought, sold, neutered and slaughtered, in accordance with economic expediency. Very, very selfish indeed.

  13. fallout11 says:

    There are far too many humans on this planet to support with anything other than the current neo-feudal, energy-gluttonous, environmentally ruinous paradigm, as has been pointed out by many. Overshoot has occurred.

    The more people, the cheaper life becomes, and the lower the quality of life. Been to a third world country recently? I have. The one thing you see over and over, besides the grinding inescapable poverty and loss of hope is the sheer mass of people, families with 4-10 children, most starving and in poor health. You cannot feed many mouths on subsistence agriculture. Die-off is inevitable at this point, and voluntarily bringing a child into this world knowing what we on this website do is both unconscionable and irresponsible.

    Selfish? No, selfish is assuming you can do what you will without consequence to others or to yourself.

  14. cryingfreeman says:

    @fallout11, I have to admire your colossal faith in your desperately gloomy theory-creed, yet notwithstanding it boasting a consensus of “many”, I just don’t agree with it / the LATOC view that the world is on the brink of resource collapse nor do I agree that an urgent slow-down / moritorium in childbirth is called for. Rather, consumerism and the concomitant corporate fascism that feeds off it are what really need the snip – and we could actually consider the radical idea of using less energy, through genuine localization (for example). You may argue that this would be an unpopular approach due to lifestyle changes, but I suspect that given the choice, most people would somehow prefer it to forced sterilization. Besides, if society tolerates a ban on childbirth, it will place itself precariously for the next logical step in this “essential tyranny”, i.e., an imposed kill-off.

    In the meantime, and well before the last droplet of black gold is greedily consumed, I dare to hope that human ingenuity may find one or more alternative means of providing enough energy to keep civilisation from terminal collapse.