Sparks fly over wind farm

Boat/US Magazine, Sept, 2002 by Ryck Lydecker

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.