Remember Statoil? That’s the Norwegian company Maine chased out of state back at the end of the last legislative session. Statoil had a signed contract with Maine to open up the Gulf of Maine to offshore wind, but after last-minute fiddling by Gov. Paul LePage, the legislature, desperate to get the energy bill passed, reopened negotiations to give our cash-strapped University a “chance to compete.” There was no chance that UMaine, which can’t even operate enough basic math classes for its incoming freshman classes, could “compete” with a company willing to invest what would have ultimately been billions in our state, but, oh, well.

Today, UMaine and a couple of engineering partners are playing with a model of a possible wind turbine that might, if it works, provide some electricity to the island of Monhegan. They’ve invested a little money, most of it grant money and federal dollars, and it could be decades before it’s generating enough energy to matter. The company that was created, Aqua Ventus, was recently turned down for $47 million in Department of Energy funds, but got $3 million to continue research.

Why? The DOE said there were cheaper technologies. But surely they looked at Maine’s history with wind power, too. Just last year, LePage vetoed a bond for research at the university for wind power development. Why should the DOE commit funds to a program that the governor seems so very determined to scuttle?

A conservative estimate says that 149 gigawatts of energy could be produced in the Gulf of Maine, enough to power 40 million homes, or most of the Eastern seaboard. That’s about 30 percent of the homes in the entire country. If all the potential wind sites were exploited offshore, the U.S. could generate 4,000 gigawatts of power. That’s more than all the generating power by all sources in the country, and we would be able to power electric vehicles, electric heating systems, conversions of industrial energy systems from oil or gas to electricity, desalinate water in parched regions, and more, and still have energy to export.

Best yet, it would have been a clean energy source.

Statoil’s investment might seem to the average reader like a real nobrainer. A company comes to Maine, invests billions, hires Maine employees, exploits a Maine natural resource that can’t be exported, and everybody makes gobs of money.

Pretty much what our wee blue sign at the border suggests we do all the time, right?

But it was Paul LePage of the sign who chased this deal away, and now it appears that it has been permanently lost. Statoil signed on the dotted line to invest the same sum off the coast of U.K.

LePage has yet to meet a wind project he likes. He doesn’t even understand how they work, evidenced by his statement recently that wind turbines use power when the wind is not blowing to fool people into thinking that’s how wind power works.

He is mostly concerned, we understand, about using taxpayer dollars to offset wind power’s initial costs. But that doesn’t explain his opposition to Statoil, so much so that he was willing to scuttle a year’s worth of work on the energy bill to vacate a state contract, a legal nightmare.

It was also a questionable position for someone to take who supposedly holds business so dear. Canceling a contract that had not only been signed, but had been vetted through the regulatory process, was contrary to everything LePage tried to do in his first couple of years in office. Remember the red-tape meetings in every county?

There’s nothing we can do as a state now but move on, and hope LePage didn’t screw up the business climate in Maine so badly for his successor that nothing can ever be done. But the next time someone claims that LePage is business-friendly — remember Statoil.