Once upon a time, hundreds of windmills harnessed Cape Cod’s ocean breezes to grind grain. Today, residents and visitors alike cherish the few that remain as historic attractions. But a state-of-the-art "wind farm" slated to sprout up four miles offshore for generating electricity has some local boaters, fishermen and marina owners grinding their teeth.

In the eight months since Boston-based developers went public with a proposal to plant 170 wind turbines, 42 stories high, in Nantucket Sound, local reaction has intensified — from light and variable to full gale. At issue is not so much the feasibility of generating juice from the wind, according to life-long Cape Cod boater and angler John Donelan, it’s the scope and location of the project.

Unfortunately, the site, roughly five miles south of Hyannis on the mainland and about six miles from Martha’s Vineyard, is a very popular boating and fishing area with some of the most expensive oceanfront property in the country.

Donelan and the coalition of local interests he founded to fight the project, Cape Wind Opposition, say the wind farm would spread across roughly 28 square miles of Horseshoe Shoal in mid-Sound, creating an unprecedented and unnecessary navigation hazard with unknown environmental consequences and dubious economic benefits.

"This story broke in October of last year and a few of us began expressing our concerns," says Donelan. "At first, most people thought we were a bunch of crackpots tilting at windmills, if you’ll pardon the pun. Nobody took it seriously.

"But as the word got around that these guys were well-financed and very serious about this project, people started to get alarmed," he adds. "The boating and fishing culture is what drives the Cape’s $1.5 billion tourist economy and the turbine field would be right in the middle of our most popular and busy piece of water, Nantucket Sound."

Coming out against wind power is "like being against motherhood," Donelan says, adding, "I’m in favor of wind power, I think it’s something we need to explore, particularly given our country’s dependence on foreign oil."

Donelan says the project, called a "wind park" by the developer, Cape Wind Associates, may be an idea whose time is right but it’s in the wrong place. He and Wayne Kurker, owner of Hyannis Marine and founder of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound which recently merged with Cape Wind Opposition, say the site is bordered by the main ferry routes to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket Island and is crisscrossed by countless recreational vessels all season.

Nonetheless, if built, it would be the first offshore wind-powered electrical generating facility in the U.S. and the largest in the world — more than eight times the size of the 20-turbine Middlegrunden wind farm located just over a mile offshore Copenhagen, Denmark. Currently the largest, Middlegrunden, built in 2000, is designed to supply electricity to 20,000 households.

Cape Wind Associates says its $600 million project would generate 420 megawatts of electricity, nearly enough to supply all of Cape Cod and the islands during peak demand periods. But it would take a lot of equipment to do it. In applications put before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a host of other agencies, the project calls for 20-foot diameter monopiles to be driven into the seafloor roughly one-third to one-half mile apart. Above each, a 260-foot tower would hold a turbine swinging a three-bladed propeller, 328 feet in diameter, for a maximum height above the water of 426 feet.

Prop Damage
Various people and organizations have fanned opposition to the Cape Wind project in recent months through letters-to-the-editor, in town meetings and via Internet postings, citing numerous environmental concerns.

Complaints range from visual pollution of the oceanscape with a "five-mile long picket fence" on the horizon to disturbance of the seabed and the potential harm to the food chain that supports Nantucket Sound’s legendary summer angling and a year round food fishery that dates to Colonial times. Others point skyward to flocks of birds migrating along the Atlantic Flyway that stand to be injured by the turbines, in what one called "a killing field for multitudes of our avian friends." Still other naysayers claim Cape Wind is blowing smoke with its economic projections.

The head of Cape Wind Associates, James Gordon, president of Energy Management, Inc. in Boston, has ready answers to each claim and promises to perform comprehensive environmental impact studies "to ensure that the wind park is a good neighbor." Energy Management has developed seven natural gas-fired power plants and one that burns wood chips in the U.S. and Gordon’s partners in Cape Wind have built wind farms both on land and offshore in Europe.

Gordon claims that economics dictate the scope of the project. But he points out that the turbines themselves will occupy less that 1% of the 28-square-mile area on Horseshoe Shoal and that each will be marked on navigation charts and lighted in accordance with marine and aviation regulations.

Nantucket Sound, he maintains, offers "one of the few protected shallow water environs where turbines can be located far enough away to minimize visual impacts while close enough to shore for connection to the electric grid on land."

Besides, Gordon adds, Horseshoe Shoal is the only remaining area of Nantucket Sound not currently limited by conflicting uses such as dedicated shipping lanes and airplane flight paths.

The Corps of Engineers and other agencies will likely take such factors into account in permit evaluations but reviewing a utility-scale offshore wind farm is plowing new regulatory ground, says a spokesman for Rep. William D. Delahunt (D-MA).

"This project is enormous and it’s without precedent," reports Steve Schwadron, chief of staff for Delahunt whose congressional district includes Cape Cod. "Everyone is groping for the ways to review it and it’s apparent that the process is not up to the scale of this proposal."

Schwadron said that the congressman is trying to hold hearings quickly. "In our part of the country, people like nothing better than alternative energy," he added.

An Ill Wind?
Wind energy grew globally at a record clip last year, according to the American Wind Energy Association. Enough wind-generated electric capacity came on-line worldwide in 2001 to supply the equivalent needs of 1.6 million American homes, according to their March survey.

Also in March, Congress extended a federal wind energy production tax credit through 2003. The credit, the industry maintains, puts wind energy "in the competitive range with other sources of power generation" and produces roughly 10 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in the U.S. today.

While that’s enough juice to supply one million average homes, it’s still only a fraction of 1% of total U.S. supply but the AWEA estimates that some $3 billion worth of wind power proposals are on the drawing boards right now.

None of the planned projects is offshore, however, although in Europe, where suitable land is scarce, more and more projects are putting out to sea. So much so, in fact, that the European Boating Association (EBA) recently voiced its own concerns about the growth in offshore wind farms.

Magnus Anderberg, president of EBA, says planners aren’t taking recreational needs like boating and sportfishing into account when planning projects offshore in order to escape land constraints.

"In some areas, restrictions on navigation are being imposed which will make it im- possible to sail outside commercial shipping lanes," Anderberg says. He also reports that European rescue agencies are worried about the obstacle course to helicopter search and rescue operations that wind farms could create in coastal waters. But, hey, say wind power advocates, that’s also where the breezes are best.

Location, Location, Location
"The location in Nantucket Sound is about as good as you’ll find in the U.S. in terms of the wind resource and the ocean depth," reports James F. Manwell who heads the Re- newable Energy Research Laboratory at the Uni-versity of Massachusetts at Amherst.

"In many spots off the U.S. coast, the water is too deep for this type of wind farm and you would have to go to floating systems to tap the wind energy that is available," Manwell says. European investigators are doing extensive research on floating wind farms, he reports, although the technology has yet to be perfected.

However, it is feasible to anchor floating generators in up to 1,000 feet of water as much as 30 miles offshore to avoid the conflicting uses found in shallow coastal waters, Manwell added.

"In fact," he adds, "barge-mounted turbines might be the answer to conflicts like what we are seeing in Nantucket Sound. Floating wind farms might be something everybody could get behind."

—By Ryck Lydecker

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