A Mighty Wind - 6/15/03
nytimes.com
The buzz on Cape Cod is grim as summer approaches. There is little talk about beach permits or Kennedy sightings and much talk about dead birds littering beaches, jellyfish clogging waterways and tourism collapsing. Even Walter Cronkite, America's éminence grise, has issued a dire warning from his second home on Martha's Vineyard. "I'm very concerned about a private developer's plan to build an industrial energy complex across 24 square miles of publicly owned land," Cronkite intoned in a radio and television ad recently broadcast across the Cape.
The industrial energy complex in question is a wind farm. And the publicly owned land is really water -- Nantucket Sound, which separates the Cape from Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. That is where a Boston-based company called Cape Wind Associates hopes to build America's first offshore wind farm. At a cost in excess of $700 million, Cape Wind plans to spread 130 windmills, spaced a third to a half of a mile apart, across a shoal less than seven miles off the coast of Hyannis. Embedded in the ocean floor, each turbine would tower higher than the top of the Statue of Liberty's torch, its three 161-foot blades churning at 16 revolutions per minute. The wind forest promises to provide Cape Codders, on average, with 75 percent of their electricity, 1.8 percent of the total electrical needs of New England, without emitting a single microgram of greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide or mercury and without burning a single barrel of Middle Eastern oil.
The nation's leading environmental groups can barely control their enthusiasm. "We're bullish on wind," says Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace USA. "Everybody has to ante up in the fight."
But like residents of dozens of communities where other wind-farm projects have been proposed, many Cape Codders have put aside their larger environmental sensitivities and are demanding that their home be exempt from such projects. As Cronkite puts it, "Our national treasures should be off limits to industrialization.".....
.....Ultimately, though, the Kennedy that the alliance most wants on its side is Ted, but to date he has made only halting efforts on its behalf. It has managed to garner the support of Gov. Mitt Romney, and the state's attorney general, Tom Reilly, has also joined the antiwind brigade. But since Horseshoal Shoal is in federal waters, the state has little control, and opponents hold out scant hope that their junior senator, John Kerry, will lend them his aid. "Kerry's in a box," says Cliff Schechtman, editor of The Cape Cod Times. "He owns a house on Nantucket, but he's running for the presidency on a strong alternative energy platform." So they wait for Teddy to swoop in and introduce legislation that will bring Cape Wind's plans to a stop..... |
