PROFILE – NOV/DEC 2008

by Stephen E. Abbott
Photography Irvin Serrano

The passion of Angus King

Angus King is tapping his iPhone. “Some of the gizmos they make for these things are remarkable,” he says. “My kids showed me this one.” The distinctive sound of a Star Wars lightsaber suddenly fills the air as he waves the glowing phone over his head, a look of boyish delight spread across his face.

The 64-year-old former governor of Maine embraces new technologies with a gusto that is surely unusual for his generation, and it is this same irrepressible enthusiasm for the potential of human innovation that has found him launching ambitious new enterprises at an age when many are easing into retirement.

While King’s biography may read like the resume of an overachiever—prominent Maine lawyer, successful businessman, twenty-year television host, and popular two-term governor who won reelection by one of the largest margins in state history—his unassuming demeanor and impassioned soliloquies on the boundless possibilities for Maine’s energy future reveal him to be something else entirely: a wide-eyed idealist with a lot of old-fashioned common sense.

Independence Wind

Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky was once asked what made him a great player. “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been,” he replied. King employs this quote frequently, and it pretty much captures his forward-thinking approach to leadership—a subject he has thought a great deal about. As a distinguished lecturer at Bowdoin College in his hometown of Brunswick, King teaches a course every spring semester on the world’s great leaders.

King is not one to merely expound on the virtues of leadership, however—he’s the sort who needs to get things done. Along with his friend and business partner Rob Gardiner, the former president of Maine Public Broadcasting, King created Independence Wind in 2007 to develop large-scale wind-power projects across Maine. “I got tired of talking about global climate change and energy security, and I decided it was time to start doing something about it,” says King. The company is a for-profit business, but King takes a more encompassing view of its mission: he sees wind power as a way to bring stability—even prosperity—to Maine’s economic future. “I don’t see any reason why Maine can’t lead the world in energy innovation,” he says.

In addition to several projects in the early testing phases, Independence Wind already has a wind farm under development in Roxbury. Current plans are calling for twenty-two wind turbines capable of producing fifty-five megawatts—or nearly two percent of Maine’s peak electricity demand. While the percentage may be small, the wind farm would represent a big step forward for a state whose energy future remains far from certain.

A Saudi Arabia of Wind

King has an affinity for big ideas. Really big ideas. Consider this one: a $15 billion floating wind farm in the Gulf of Maine that would comprise 1,000 turbines spread across twenty-six square miles of ocean. At a low fixed cost to the consumer, the offshore wind farm would electrify and heat every home in Maine—and power every car—indefinitely. A big idea indeed.

On a frigid morning this past February, four old friends—Robert Kennedy, Allen Fernald, Janet Waldron, and George Hart of the Ocean Energy Institute in Rockland—showed up at King’s house with a proposal. They believed that offshore wind could be a viable solution to Maine’s looming energy crisis, and they needed a spokesperson, someone who could help sell this big idea to the people of Maine.

King unveiled the idea two months later in a speech delivered at Bowdoin. He began by quoting from a message Abraham Lincoln delivered to Congress amidst the turmoil of the Civil War, in which he called upon Americans to “think anew and act anew.” When Lincoln penned these words, it was two months before he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Confederate states were as dependent on the institution of slavery as America is dependent on oil today.

King’s speech was delivered 147 years to the day after Lincoln called for the mobilization of an army to oppose the seditious South, a decision that irrevocably altered the course of American history. By invoking Lincoln’s words, King was saying that the economic and moral challenges we face today are as urgent and dire as those that once fractured our country in twain.

The Translator

Every day, countless speeches are delivered on college campuses across the country, and yet rarely does a whisper of these talks filter out to the world beyond. But such is the magnetism of King’s persona that this speech attracted a flurry of media attention and got a lot of important people thinking, Maybe we can actually do this. A small group of state leaders, academics, and business people is already exploring ways to make the wind project a reality. “I was launching an idea that day, thinking that maybe it could be accomplished in ten years. Now I’m thinking six or seven.”

“I see myself as a translator,” King says. “There was nothing new in my speech; it was just the right idea at the right time.” King is not a scientist or an engineer—his talents are at once more ephemeral and more visceral. He possesses that near-mystical ability to connect with people, to get them to stop and really listen, that true leaders possess.

King grows quiet for a moment. “I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone this before,” he says, before going on to describe a sun-streaked morning in his late teens when he was having a discussion with friends. “I don’t remember what we were talking about, but I suddenly knew that my role in life could be to take big ideas and present them in a way that would be accessible to people. I realized in that moment: I can do this.”

It is early autumn, and King is sitting in his office at the law firm of Bernstein Shur in Portland. Behind him, a window overlooks Portland Harbor and a gargantuan cruise ship in dock, its vast hull and multiple decks towering over a five-story building below. Listening to King, it is hard not to see the ship as a conspicuous symbol of our state’s inconstant and unpredictable economy. In less than a day, it will back out of its berth and float off into the Atlantic with its transient cargo of tourists. The money spent during their fleeting visit will, for the time being, fill the tills of local businesses. But winter is coming, oil prices are high, and the cruise ships won’t return until next summer.

According to estimates by the U.S. Department of Energy, close to a million megawatts of untapped wind power exists just off America’s shorelines—a figure roughly equivalent to the total production from all of our nation’s current energy sources combined. “If the Gulf of Maine project comes together at the scale I originally proposed, it could mean ten or twenty thousand new jobs for Maine. I see a huge industry building offshore wind turbines over the next decades and I ask myself: Why not Maine?”

“Nothing has to be invented to do this—it only has to be engineered,” Kings says. “But we are not going to make it with incremental modifications to what we have already done. The times are so perilous that we need to think big. I’m a cockeyed optimist: I think big problems can be solved.”

“And one of the beautiful things about Maine is that you can sit down with real people and come up with a solution.”

To hear Angus King’s speech, “The Saudi Arabia of Wind: Confronting Maine’s Energy Catastrophe”, go to mpbn.net/radio/ondemand/speakinginmaine.html.