Today in the NY Times, there's an exciting article about efforts to develop deepwater, floating wind turbines. The article makes it clear that there are still engineering and major costs hurdles, but I'm hopeful that one day floating wind farms will provide bountiful zero-carbon electricity. But we have to get started today, and fortunately we can. The Cape Wind project proposed for Nantucket Sound is ready to be built now.
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Click here to read this column by Natural Resources Defense Council Executive Director Peter Lehner

By: Yoni Cohen on November 17

Eight long years after Energy Management Inc. (EMI) began the permitting process for Cape Wind, its proposed billion-dollar wind farm offshore from Cape Cod, the Massachusetts project may be in sight of final approval. In early November, United States Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said that he hoped his agency would make a final decision on Cape Wind by the end of the year. Then, Massachusetts Congressman Ed Markey urged Salazar to further expedite the review process and approve the construction of 130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound before next month’s international climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

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Click here to read this article in Business Week

Attorney General Martha Coakley appreciates the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's love for Nantucket Sound. But, as for his vision of its future, that's not a view she shares.

Despite Kennedy's opposition, Coakley, who is running for the Senate seat formerly held by Kennedy, counts herself as a strong supporter of the Nantucket Sound wind farm, proposed to stand about six miles off the coast from Kennedy's Hyannisport home.  "I don't blame him for (opposing the project)," Coakley said yesterday in an editorial board meeting with the Cape Cod Times. "This was a place he lived, a place he loved. But I know that the argument, for many people, is an aesthetic one."

The wind farm would include 130 turbines in the middle of the Sound. Coakley approves of the project's size, scale and location and said it would be a big step toward the renewable energy goals of both the state and the country.  "We are running out of time to look at what we need to do for alternative energies," she said. "Unless we push forward with projects like Cape Wind ... we're not ever going to break through on this."
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Click here to read this article in the Cape Cod Times

Click here to read a related article in the Boston Globe in which all 4 democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate declare their support for Cape Wind at an environmental forum

...For the state, which controls fisheries in the federal waters of the Sound, a potential traditional cultural property designation raises serious concerns, said Lisa Capone, spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs.

A designation "would result in additional regulatory constraints for long-standing commercial activities such as fishing and navigation, as well as further delays for the nation's first offshore wind farm which has undergone eight years of environmental review," Capone said.

Anything that affects the Sound would be subject to these new standards, said Cape Wind vice president Dennis Duffy. This includes not just activities in the water but anything visible from the water, he said.  The move could mean a "radical expansion of regulations" for activities such as waterfront construction and ferry traffic, he said.
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Click here to read this article in the Cape Cod Times

Op Ed by Rachel Pachter, Cape Wind Assistant Project Manager, as published in the Cape Cod Times.

American politics      Democracy in America

Blowhards

Nov 9th 2009, 16:16 by The Economist

THE first time I read that rich people in Cape Cod were organising to block the Cape Wind offshore wind-farm project because it would spoil their view, I thought it was a joke. The appreciation of a beautiful and unspoiled view is supposed to entail an appreciation of nature; wind power is the most sympathetic possible instantiation of such an appreciation of nature in the modern energy economy. To prefer that a power plant somewhere in the interior burn coal, polluting the environment, encouraging strip-mining, and pumping carbon into the atmosphere, in order to continue to be able to fantasise that the view from the sprucewood deck of one's Nantucket cottage remains the same as it was when Herman Melville saw it, or whatever, is a gross perversion of the environmentalist and preservationist ethic.
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Click here to read the entire essay on the Economist Magazine website

By Beth Daley  GLOBE STAFF

Although U.S. Rep. Edward J. Markey is chair of a congressional climate change committee and a co-sponsor of clean energy legislation, he’s never explicitly come out in favor of the proposed Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound.  Yet today, Markey wrote a strongly worded two-page letter to U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar urging him to approve the Cape Wind project before next month’s international climate talks in Copenhagen.

“Approving the Cape Wind project as the nation’s first commercial offshore wind project before the start of the U.N. conference would send a strong message to international negotiators about the United States’ commitment to developing sources of clean energy and reducing global warming pollution,’’ Markey wrote.
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Click here to read this article in the Boston Globe

Let’s see if we have this straight: The Wampanoag tribe is claiming the construction of the Cape Wind project would threaten or destroy their religion by impeding sacred rituals that require an unblocked view of the sunrise over Nantucket Sound. Would this be the same people whose Aquinnah tribe is proposing a wind turbine for the Gay Head cliffs on Martha’s Vineyard?

...Thus, this latest delay is not merely a frivolous further delaying tactic, but holds potential to actively harm the causes of environmentally responsible development. A legal victory for the Wampanoags would place a dangerous new tool in the hands of all who seek to block development projects anywhere, anytime.

It is long past time for the Department of the Interior to clear away the final hurdles standing in the way of Cape Wind. There’s only one way to determine whether Cape Wind can fulfill the promise of renewable wind power for the region: Build it and put it to the test.
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Click here to read this editorial in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette

...Mitchell T. Baer, director of the Office of Policy and International Affairs at the U.S. Department of Energy, said that for too long national energy policy ignored renewable power, including offshore wind. He spoke of what he called the “inertia of the status quo,” saying momentum will pick up when major projects are developed. Cape Wind, the controversial 130-turbine wind farm proposed off Cape Cod still awaiting federal approval, could be one test case.

“If it goes forward, you’ve got one big domino that’s going to fall,” he said.

Note: Click here to read this article in the Providence Journal