Cape Wind - The Book

This Just In From The Independent - London

Storm over Cape Cod

Famous names fight wind farm plan in millionaires' playground

By Leonard Doyle in Hyannis, Cape Cod
Friday, 4 July 2008

As she put the finishing touch to a watercolour outside the gated community of Oyster Harbours, Nancy Walton wrinkled her nose at the thought of America's first offshore wind farm popping up on the horizon of Nantucket Sound. "I believe in wind power," she said, "but these will be higher than the Statue of Liberty. There are so precious few places on earth as unspoilt as this. Why can't they just put them somewhere else?"

Oyster Harbours is ground zero in a very uncivil war in which some of the wealthiest and most famous people in the country have joined forces with one of America's dirtiest businesses – the coal industry – to block an ambitious clean-energy project.

As Hyannis filled up with traffic ahead of the Independence Day holiday today, there was a whiff of cordite rather than fireworks in the air as both sides blasted away at each other.

So far, the opponents have spent more than $20m trying to kill off the project, which is known as Cape Wind and is planned for a location widely deemed ideal for offshore wind turbines.

During the summer, 130 slowly spinning windmills located five miles offshore should be invisible to the naked eye because of haze. On winter days, when the "snowbirds" (as the locals call summer visitors) have departed for Florida, the windmills will look like rotating matchsticks out on the horizon.

But a problem arises because the wind farm will at times be visible from some of the most expensive summer homes and private beaches in the US, most notably the Kennedy family compound in Hyannisport. And whether Obama Democrats or McCain Republicans, vulgar billionaires or old New England money, opponents of the project decided long ago to throw in their lot in with Big Coal to try and kill off Cape Wind. "This is like trying to put a wind farm in Yellowstone National Park as far as we're concerned," said former coal executive Glenn Wattley, who runs the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound.

Most prominent among the opponents is Edward Kennedy, patriarch of the famous political clan and now ill with brain cancer. Kennedy opposition to the wind farm may be understandable, given that the stretch of water from Cape Cod to the summer playgrounds of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard is hallowed ground where Jack, Bobby and Ted Kennedy grew up sailing dinghies and chasing girls. Other opponents include the heiress Bunny Mellon and Bill Koch, a billionaire oil and coal industrialist who is the main financial force behind the opposition.

A number of those now advising John McCain in his run for the presidency have also lobbied against the wind farm. The firm owned by Charlie Black, Mr McCain's chief strategist until a few months ago, is busy pulling the levers of power from Boston to Washington DC in his efforts to to derail the project, although Mr McCain himself is an enthusiastic Cape Wind supporter.

So upset was the author Wendy Williams by the distortions of the anti-wind farm lobby and the squandering of public money on countless hearings and lawsuits in the past seven years, that she wrote a book about the battle called Cape Wind. "The global elite are simply out of control," she said. "Environmentalism is fashionable among this crowd, but they still drive SUVs to Save-the-Whale rallies."

Jim Gordon, the man behind Cape Wind, is not a member of the Cape Cod set. He has spent more than $30m in the past seven years trying to get the project off the ground. He finds himself branded as a rapacious outsider who wants to pocket extraordinary profits and spoil the famous view. However, for all the well-funded opposition, Cape Wind has plenty of local and national support. Leading environmental organisations including Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defence Council and the Sierra Club want it to go ahead. Locals hope the project will reduce rising electricity bills and help clean up the air they breathe.

Cape Cod has some of the worst air quality in Massachusetts. The fumes from oil and coal-fired electricity generating plants are trapped by the sea breezes and hover over the cape for days on end.

Barbara Hill runs a grassroots environmental organisation known as Clean Power Now and often finds herself at the wrong end of a disinformation campaign being run by the anti-wind power lobby.

"All the money being splashed around to kill off the wind farm is a scandal," Ms Hill said. "The turbines are a perfect marriage between nature and technology and we have had working windmills throughout our heritage in New England.

"We want people to sit on the beach, see the windmills and make the connection between the energy they consume and its production. For too long people have ignored the pollution caused by oil and coal."

On the beach with Jack, Ted, Bill and Gordon

Cape Cod and the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket have been attracting visitors since the time of the Pilgrims. When President Kennedy was alive, war cabinet meetings were held at the Kennedy family home in Hyannisport (where he and his brothers, Ted and Bobby, grew up), with JFK wrapping up the meetings early so he could take his visitors out on Nantucket Sound in the family yacht, Honey Fitz. "I always come back to the Cape and walk on the beach when I have a tough decision to make," he once said. Bill Clinton holidayed on Martha's Vineyard along with Hillary and Chelsea and found it was one of the few places that he could go in America without running into protesters. The Vineyard is also a favourite of Gordon Brown. He honeymooned at the Wequassett Inn in Chatham in 2000 and has been a frequent visitor to Cape Cod.

An Even Better Flourescent Bulb

Brown bulb breakthrough

01:00 AM EDT on Wednesday, July 2, 2008

(Editorial from the Providence Journal)

We’ve all been told to switch from incandescent light bulbs to those fluorescent ones, which last much longer, save a lot on electric bills and are better for the environment. Well, they aren’t entirely good for the last because they contain tiny amounts of mercury, which is highly toxic. The things should not just willy-nilly be thrown in the trash, and people must take care not to break them (and follow instructions of what to do if they do).

But now, a breakthrough! The Journal’s Peter Lord reports that a team at Brown has discovered a material — nanoselenium — that rapidly absorbs mercury gases. It could be used as a lining inside fluorescent-bulb packaging and as a tool for cleaning up broken bulbs.

The team, Robert Hurt, Natalie Johnson, Steven Hamburg, et al., have applied for patents and expect soon to enter into talks with companies that could make the packaging. Meanwhile, drop off your old bulbs at Home Depot and elsewhere for recycling.

Young Bobby Strikes Again

It seems Bobby is back at the microphone, going on with his "just not here" stuff. Last night on Larry King, RFK Junior said that Cape Wind is "going to put out of business every fisherman on the Cape."

What is wrong with this guy? Does he think this kind of hyperbole is effective? Like most of the rest of the politicians in America today, Li'l Bobby apparently thinks the American people are stupid.

I don't think they're stupid. But I sure do think they're angry...Without any of us noticing, we seem to have developed a royal class. Bobby apparently thinks if he just gets his face on enough magazines like Vanity Fair, he'll get to be New York's next senator. I think people are smarter than that.

Coonamessett Farm Turbine Commissioned

Here is Wendy between Tom Wineman of Clean Energy Design and Andre Schlink of Aircon in front of the Aircon 10S recently commissioned at Ron Smolowitz's Coonamessett Farm.  Andre made the trip across the pond to upgrade the controller. The turbine is pumping out clean energy for the farm!
Wendy had a great talk with Andre about the status of small wind in Europe.Come one, come all and enjoy the sight of green power being generated.

Cape Wind Paperback In Stores Now

 Cover Quotes:

"A great summer beach read...Cape Wind is less an argument for wind power than an indictment of our money-soaked political process."
Robert Sullivan, The New York Times Book Review

"Enough political intrigue to keep a John Grisham farn happy...." -- St. Petersburg Times

"A ripe subject, populated with the sort of people who would be among the first to count themselves as friends of the Earth but the last to accept an environmentally friendly energy source if it meant the slightest cloud on their ocean views." -- The Wall Street Journal

"A genuine page-turner...gleefully entertaining" -- Boston Globe


"Breezy and informative fun." -- Alex Beam, The Weekly Standard

"Written in a pithy style, the book is a revaltory examination of the intersection of politics and class."
-- Block Island Times

"Cape Wind, a five-and-a-half-year tale of power and money run amok amid a cast of characters worthy of a soap opera, is a page-turner..." -- Cape Cod Chronicle

A Failure of Leadership

A propos of Governor King's talk

 

                I’ve been giving lots of talks about Cape Wind around the country, and I can tell you – the American people are getting really angry. Both Democrats and Republicans are equally disgusted by what they read in our book about Cape Wind.

               

                At this point, they’re angry about a lot more than Ted Kennedy and Mitt Romney getting together behind the scenes or over dinner to plot about how to kill Cape Wind.

 

                The average American has caught on to the fact that the above behavior is happening in every sector. Corporate behavior is simply out of control. The airlines behave as if passengers are little more than cattle. The insurance companies have doubled and tripled their prices. Food prices have sky-rocketed, while the farmers who grow the food see little in the way of increased money. (It mostly goes to speculators.) Gasoline prices are doing real harm to rural people, who have little in the way of discretionary income in the first place.

 

                Meanwhile, the folks in Washington fiddle and fiddle.

 

                There are some simple things a leader – a genuine leader, that is – could do to bring things under control.

 

                How about, for starters, suggesting that all American who own a car give up one automobile trip this coming Sunday. Since a good deal of the current price of gasoline is due to speculators’ trading, imagine what would happen to the speculators if that happened. The price of gas would drop immediately.

 

                And if a leader helped ensure that Americans kept up that kind of genuine grassroots pressure (as opposed to the “Astroturf” emanating from fossil-fuel-funded outfits like the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound), the people themselves, with the right leadership, just might be able to bring this problem at least a little bit under control.

 

                That won’t happen though. That’s because “leadership” is afraid to step out. Or, more likely, just doesn’t want to be bothered. After all, if they want to travel somewhere, all they have to do is call up someone with a corporate jet, and they’re ready to ride…..

                 

“Catastrophe” Awaits Maine: Angus King - Former Gov

This is from the Ellsworth American today. Read it, listen, and heed!

New Energy Sources Urgently Needed

Former Maine Governor Angus King

NORTHPORT — Apparently, the sky IS falling!

That’s the word not from Chicken Little, but from former Maine Governor Angus King, who says he doesn’t use the term “catastrophe” lightly.

“This is a human catastrophe coming at us in the state of Maine in terms of energy supply and costs,” King said last week at a daylong seminar on harnessing tidal energy and offshore wind to confront runaway energy costs, costs he sees as a direct threat to Maine being habitable.

“This winter, the cost of fuel oil is going to more than double,” he said. “What’s being quoted now is $4.96 — $5 a gallon. That’s $1,000 to fill up your tank in the basement one time, and most people are going to have to fill up their tank six times.

“How is somebody who is making $350 or $400 a week going to pay to fill up the tank to keep warm? How are they going to pay to fill up the truck to get to work? This is, I think, the most serious crisis to ever face the state of Maine.”

Tapping the energy of coastal Maine’s offshore winds will require development of wind turbines not unlike those phased into use last fall six miles off the coast of Liverpool, England. The Burbo Bank Offshore Wind Farm uses 25 turbines, each standing 459 feet above the Irish Sea, to generate enough electricity to power 80,000 homes.—PHOTO COURTESY OF NATIONAL RENEWABLE ENERGY LABORATORIES

King told an audience of 120 state, regional and national experts on alternative energy concepts that the time for talk is over and that solutions need to be found and implemented. An investor in an onshore wind farm in western Maine, King said the greatest and most reliable source of wind energy is in deep water, some 25 miles offshore. Although the technology for harnessing that wind energy has yet to be developed outside of Europe, it better be soon, he warned.

“This is a catastrophe,” he said. “This isn’t business as usual. This isn’t some minor little problem. This isn’t do not pass school buses or what’s the speed limit on the Interstate. This is a disaster in the state of Maine that’s coming at us.”

King first sounded the alarm about energy costs undermining the social and economic fabric of Maine during a speech in April at Bowdoin College titled “The Saudi Arabia of Wind: Confronting Maine’s Energy Catastrophe.”

In that speech, and in his address last week at The Power of the Gulf seminar sponsored by the University of Maine Law School and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, King noted that no state is more dependent on oil than is Maine.

“Eighty percent of homes in Maine are heated with oil,” he said. “The national average is 9 percent. If you do the math, 87 percent of the total energy bill of the average Maine person is dependent on oil or natural gas, and that is a particularly serious problem.”

King notes that oil prices have more than tripled in the last 10 years. Only six months ago, he said, the price of oil was $75 a barrel. Last week it was $114.

“A non-hysterical prediction is that, by 2020, oil will be $300 a barrel, which means $10 a gallon for gasoline, which means $10 a gallon fuel oil. It means filling up the tank in your car will be $200, with incomes not that different. It means $2,000 to fill the oil tank in the basement.

“Here’s the catastrophe part,” he said at Bowdoin College. “In 1998, energy — all energy: cars, home heating and electricity — was 4 percent of the average Maine family’s budget. Today it’s 20 percent. It went from 4 percent to 20 percent in 10 years. That’s pain.”

Should oil hit $300 a barrel, King said, that percentage would increase from 20 percent to as much as 50 percent of the average family budget.

Former Maine Governor Angus King

“We go from pain to lethal,” he said. “We simply can’t survive that. This state and this country are not viable at that level of energy costs. If this happens, it’s all over. We won’t have an election for governor in 2020; we’ll have an election for chief park ranger, because that’s all this state will be, a large park of some kind that is largely uninhabitable.

“Fifty percent of your budget for energy and 20 percent for health care leaves 30 percent for everything else: mortgage, rent, food. It’s just absolutely unsustainable.”

King predicted in Northport that $300 oil would see families pulling up stakes and dramatically changing how they live.

“The old thing we heard was people choosing between medicine and food,” he said. “People are going to be choosing between heat and food. People are going to be living together. People are going to be moving in to have five or 10 people in an apartment to deal with this problem.

“This is a really urgent problem, and I don’t think the world has come to grips with how serious.”

Doing nothing is not an option, King said. That’s what created what he sees as an unsustainable status quo.

“Every president since Nixon has been talking about energy independence — all of my adult life — and we haven’t done a damn thing about it,” he said. “Nothing. We are just as dependent on oil today — and particularly foreign oil — as we were in 1970.”

King realizes he’s hardly painting a rose-colored scenario. He’s not being a pessimist, he feels, as much as a realist.

“I hope I have sufficiently depressed you,” he said at Bowdoin College. “This is serious stuff.”

 

The Deal on Blue H

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From Today's Providence Journal:

 

BLUE H, A BRITISH company with offices in the Netherlands, has opened a U.S. office in Boston to oversee its proposal to build a large deepwater offshore wind project in federal waters far south of Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

In March, the company raised hackles on Cape Cod and southeastern Massachusetts when it seemed to be presenting itself as an alternative to Cape Wind, a 130-turbine project first proposed in 2001 and still undergoing the federal permitting process.

Cape Wind would have a total capacity of 468 megawatts, and says it will be able to produce, on good wind days, as much as 420 megawatts of power for Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

Blue H’s proposed project has a total capacity of 420 megawatts. The company says its project would consist of 120 turbines, each with a capacity of 3.5 megawatts. The project would be designed, the company says, to handle an extreme wave height of just under 100 feet.

The project would be placed 32 miles southeast of Block Island. It would be a few miles closer to Martha’s Vineyard.

This would place the project in extremely deep water. Current technology only allows for the construction of commercially viable wind-energy project in comparatively shallow, near-shore water.

However, several oil companies have experimented with extremely expensive deep-water turbines. Those companies hope to develop that technology further. Those turbines have been placed on oil-drilling platforms that are no longer needed for drilling.

Blue H’s technology, also in the experimental stage, takes an entirely different approach. The company hopes to build square platforms that would consist of very lightweight steel with hollow cores. Because they are hollow, the platforms are intended to float atop the water. They would be anchored to the ocean bottom by means of four chains, each at a platform corner, connected to a very heavy weight lying on the ocean bed.

Atop the platform would be a turbine with two blades, rather than the customary three. Two blades convert the energy of the wind into power more efficiently and spin more quickly than three-bladed turbines. They also make much more noise, so that the wind industry does not use them on land or in near-shore areas.

Blue H has yet to realize this technology. The company currently has a prototype of a floating platform in the water off the east coast of Italy. It says it will install an 80-kilowatt two-bladed turbine on that platform sometime this summer. The machine would produce power to operate equipment on the platform, but would not send power to the Italian mainland.

In the summer of 2009, the company says, it will install two 2.5 megawatt turbines at the same location.

One of the major challenges facing deep water wind developers is the extremely high construction costs of building far out to sea.

Blue H says that its innovative design will cut costs in a variety of ways.

“Our estimates — and we underline estimates — are that we can build a project at 20 percent less cost than equivalent shallow water projects,” said Raymond Dackerman, the general manager of Blue H’s U.S. endeavor. “We will be using less steel than traditional monopole installations. We don’t have to prepare the seabed. And we don’t have to construct our turbines out at sea, since we can build the platform on land and then tow it out to its deep-water location.”

The company is quite bullish on how quickly it can translate designs still on the drawing board into functioning machinery. “It’s here. It’s here now,” Dackerman said.

However, given that the company has yet to build even one functioning turbine on a floating platform, the technology is likely to require many years of development before a large-scale project can operate successfully in the rough waters of the North Atlantic.

One thing is certain, however. Blue H is astonishingly well-connected in the United States, politically speaking.

The company was brought over from Europe to Massachusetts by U.S. Democratic Congressman William Delahunt, a notorious opponent of Cape Wind who has repeatedly threatened “endless lawsuits” if Cape Wind is approved. Delahunt and other aggressive Cape Wind opponents have been claiming that Blue H’s project is a viable alternative to Cape Wind.

Blue H also has received the political thumbs-up from Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, now ailing with brain cancer, who vehemently opposes Cape Wind, which would be visible from family summer houses on Cape Cod.

“We are optimistic that we are going to have the entire [legislative] delegation supporting us,” Dackerman said. He listed a number of congressmen who, he said, are very supportive of Blue H’s endeavor, including Congressman Edward Markey, Congressman Barney Frank, and Congressman Steve Lynch.

By contrast, only Frank in the above list has spoken publicly in favor of Cape Wind. Both Markey and Lynch have been asked repeatedly about their position on Cape Wind by Cape Wind supporters; both have refused to answer. Their refusals have been based on statements that not enough is known about Cape Wind.

Blue H appears to have more than adequate funding.

“This project will be built with private funding,” Dackerman said.

He also said that no public money has yet been used to finance the U.S. project.

To begin construction of its American project, the company needs permission from the federal Minerals Management Agency to erect a wind-speed monitoring tower. The company missed the deadline to apply in the initial round of applications.

Most observers expected that Blue H would have to wait for the next application round, but Dackerman said that Blue H officials had had a very positive meeting with Congressman Ed Markey.

“Markey told us there’s a shot that MMS may be able to approve us before the second round,” Dackerman said.

At this point, Blue H appears to have an interesting technological concept. Floating turbines with less expensive seabed anchoring could indeed, if viable, produce less expensive electric power than other types of deep-water wind innovations.

It’s a shame, though, that the company has allowed itself to become embroiled in the Cape Wind debate. Cape Wind’s proposed technology is commercially tested and ready to go. Blue H’s innovative concept, while interesting, has yet to be tested.

Dackerman said that, given the current global energy crises, both Cape Wind and Blue H ought to be considered.

Wendy Williams, an occasional contributor, is a Cape Cod-based science writer and co-author of the book Cape Wind.

Green in Falmouth

The Unitarian Universalist Church of Falmouth which hosted Wendy's Book TV talk has further shown it's commitment to doing its part for renewable energy by installing a 4.3 kW photovoltaic system.

Kudos to them and Tom Wineman of Clean Energy Design who installed the system today. You'll remember Tom from the book - there is a great picture of him holding a YES sign in Mitt Romney's face at Craigville Beach.

Breakthrough Institute Responds

In response to your recent post about Barbara Hill, who has been listed as a senior fellow on our website since January -- our fellows are not paid anything for their work. And it would be inaccurate to characterize the Breakthrough Institute as virulently anti-coal. We believe in a large government investment in clean energy to replace coal, but also acknowledge that cheap energy is an important part of the global economy and development, and it doesn't make much sense to be staunchly opposed to it before we can offer a viable, affordable alternative. We also support coal with carbon capture and storage.