The Minerals Management Service (MMS) has released a very positive Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) on Cape Wind! 

• Cape Wind Talking Points
• MMS Webpage - including electronic downloadable copy of the DEIS
• Articles, Editorials, and Letters about MMS DEIS
• Cape Wind responds to opposition group's false claims on electricity prices

Cape Wind’s Response to opposition group’s claims about electricity prices, February, 2008

An organization that formed for the single purpose of defeating Cape Wind has long claimed that Cape Wind would harm the environment and the region.  Yet after six years of comprehensive and rigorous analysis by Federal and State Permitting Agencies, it is clear that the public benefits of Cape Wind have been verified and that the opposition group’s various claims have not been based upon fact.

The Opposition’s Last Stand – Misleading Economic Arguments
Having failed to convince permitting agencies or the public that its past claims are legitimate, the opposition group has now settled upon a new and false economic assertion that the Cape Wind will have a “devastating” impact upon electric rates. Here again, the opposition group is seeking to mislead the public.

The Massachusetts Energy Facilities Siting Board found that Cape Wind would reduce electricity prices: “The record shows that the wind farm will tend to reduce market clearing prices for electricity because it will … displace power plants with higher marginal costs. The savings resulting from this displacement would accrue to electric customers, and are estimated to be $25 million per year for New England customers….” EFSB 02-2, p. 162.

Cape Wind will also be able to offer long-term stable pricing, in contrast to fossil fueled generation sources, whose prices have been volatile and rising. Since Cape Wind was proposed in 2001, oil prices have quadrupled and natural gas prices have doubled.

And the construction cost of all types of new power plants have also risen due to increasing commodity prices of steel, copper and other building costs. The difference is that new wind farms will operate on a free, clean fuel, while new fossil plants will operate on costly fuels that will continue to get more expensive in the future.

Specifically, the opposition group now attempts to mislead the public with an intensive advertising campaign that claims the new Federal MMS Draft Environmental Impact Statement “reveals” that Cape Wind’s electricity could cost up to 300% more than current electric pricing in the wholesale spot market.

In fact, the MMS did not make such a conclusion. The opposition group is relying upon a statement from a draft analysis that was deliberately not used in the DEIS because, after peer review, it was acknowledged to be unsupported and misleading, as the MMS author explained:

“Given the uncertainty of the revenue potential from the project, and the fact that a rigorous analysis of the revenue streams was not conducted, it is acknowledged that the [model] does not give a precise estimate of the [cost of energy] for the project sites evaluated. References to the apparent profitability of development at any of the sites could therefore be misleading, and will not be made in the EIS.”

In any event, the MMS author explained that the intended use of his analysis was to compare the relative costs of alternative locations, and Cape Wind’s proposed site on Horseshoe Shoal was found to superior economically to the other alternative sites, including a ‘South of Tuckernuck’ deeper water site that the opposition group has long championed as a better alternative to Cape Wind.

The opposition group has taken to the airwaves in another expensive advertising campaign to mislead the public about Cape Wind, this time on the only argument they feel they have left, economics. Yet the points they try to make rely upon twisting the words of the Minerals Management Service Economic Model in precisely the way the author warned would be misleading.

Background on the Opposition Group
The organization that formed to oppose Cape Wind variously goes by the names of Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, Save Our Sound, and Nantucket Soundkeepers (referred to hereafter as the Alliance). The CEO of the Alliance, Glenn Wattley has stated that most of his career has been spent in coal industry. Recently, Wattley stated to National Public Radio that his organization has spent $15 million dollars to date in their effort "to seeing this project fail."

The Boston Globe and Cape Cod Today have reported on the accidental release of internal Alliance fundraising documents in 2006 that disclosed that over 94% of their donations came from large donors, writing checks of $20,000 or more, most of whom are seasonal residents who own homes overlooking Nantucket Sound. The largest donor identified was Bill Koch who had given over one million dollars in one year to the Alliance and who is Co-Chairman of the Alliance's Board of Directors.  Koch also owns Oxbow Energy, two of Oxbow's largest divisions are in coal mining and in the distribution and marketing of petroleum coke, a solid leftover from the oil refining process that is dirtier than coal.

The Boston Globe reported that on one Labor Day Weekend, the Alliance distributed tens of thousands of fliers in regional newspapers that depicted a nautical chart of Nantucket Sound that tripled the size of the area of where the wind turbines would be located. The Alliance initially defended their chart as accurate but later said they "made a mistake". It was also widely reported by the Boston Globe, Cape Cod Times and other news media that the Alliance's former Technical and Research Director was caught red-handed committing a fraudulent act intended to defame and smear Cape Wind, an act he denied at first but later admitted to.

Greenpeace has closely observed and researched the first four years of the Alliance's operations, an organization that Greenpeace describes as an "Orwellian Group". The findings of Greenpeaces research can be found at http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/alliance