Guest column: A long-winded solution

Ten miles southeast of Baltimore is the Brandon Shores Generating Station, the state's largest coal-fired power plant and one of six that provide almost 60 percent of our state's electricity needs. Earlier this year, the Natural Resources Defense Council ranked Maryland as the nation's fifth-worst emitter of toxic air pollutants, by itself producing 7 percent of the country's total hazardous air emissions from power plants. Brandon Shores was the state's top contributor.

Exposure to toxic air pollutants can cause or contribute to health concerns ranging from asthma to cancer, but because this state relies on coal to generate the majority of its electricity, more and more pollutants enter the air each day. Common sense says we need a way to generate the nation's power without harming human health, and renewable energy offers us a way to do so.

Maryland's most promising renewable resource, offshore wind, could help us move away from coal and other fossil fuels while creating hundreds of construction, operation and maintenance jobs. Touting these new jobs, Gov. Martin O'Malley introduced a bill this year to jump-start construction on the state's first offshore wind farm and move Maryland away from relying on power plants like Brandon Shores.

The Maryland Offshore Wind Energy Act would have required the state's public electric utilities to buy electricity from a proposed wind farm off Ocean City's coast for the next 25 years. This wind farm would have been large enough to power more than half the homes in Baltimore and been located more than 10 miles away from shore — far enough away to be barely visible on the horizon. Unfortunately, concerns over electricity rate increases prevented the bill from gaining enough support to pass, despite the fact that households would have been able to offset the rate increase by replacing roughly two 60-watt normal light bulbs with compact fluorescents. Regarding universities in particular, the bill's opponents questioned whether schools like this university that use a lot of electricity would be willing to pay these higher energy prices.

O'Malley has already promised to reintroduce a version of the bill during the 2012 legislative session, and Clean Energy at UMD has started a campaign to get the University System of Maryland to announce its support for offshore wind. We believe we should no longer have to endanger our communities' health to keep the lights on and are working with the Student Government Association, Residence Hall Association and other student groups across the campus to raise student awareness of and support for offshore wind.

If you feel the same, come to the next on-campus meeting of our statewide partner, the Maryland Student Climate Coalition at noon on Saturday in the basement of Jimenez Hall and sign our petition online at www.umdforcleanenergy.org/petition.html. If you cannot make the meeting, Clean Energy for UMD meetings are Monday nights at 7 p.m. in the Benjamin Banneker Room A in Stamp Student Union.

Sam Rivers is the communications director of Clean Energy for UMD. He can be reached at brivers@terpmail.umd.edu.