Former governor Angus King is not blowing smoke about wind power. His appeal for a "wind ranch in the Gulf of Maine becomes more and more appealing with every passing day of rising energy costs.

Earlier this week, during a speech at Bowdoin College, King said the Gulf of Maine could be a "Saudi Arabia of wind" for its potential for power generation. He called for a "Manhattan Project" effort for a $15 billion network of offshore turbines.

Energy demands will require that type of big thinking. Crippling oil prices, driven by speculation and escalating overseas demand, are here to stay. Maine's electricity supply and costs are helpless against the demands of southern grid neighbors.

If Maine were to seize such a massive offshore project, and become an emirate of wind power energy, it could become as stable and affluent as other resource exporting states around the nation, like Wyoming and Alaska.

The environmental and economic gains from such a historic project would also be well worth the investment. Especially if Angus King's Stephen King-like projections of Maine possibly becoming an uninhabitable wasteland due to high oil costs comes to pass.

But, as Angus King knows too well, proclaiming Maine's potential for energy production through wind is easy to say, and near-impossible to achieve.

Unless a project is sited in an out-of-the-way, unvisited, unremarkable corner of the state, potential for wind power has gone unrealized. Environmentalists bitterly disagree on projects, as do neighboring towns.

King's own firm, Independence Wind, only earned a split decision for its turbine projects in Byron and Roxbury. Yet the state has designated Maine's rural towns as for expedited reviews of future wind power plans, in the interest of meeting lofty energy benchmarks.

These forces are on an inevitable collision course. An offshore project would be a supernova.

Our society's energy challenges are just beginning, however. King is dead right in one important vein: we, as a race and culture, cannot expect this crisis to solve itself. We must act now.

This starts by dreaming - and thinking big. In energy, nothing is out of the question.