As at least four Maine island communities are actively discussing the costs and benefits of siting “community wind” farms to supply electric power to Vinalhaven, North Haven, Swan’s and Frenchboro, it is useful to reflect what happened when a much larger project was proposed offshore of two island communities in Massachusetts. By now most people in New England are at least dimly aware of the controversy surrounding a proposal to site 130 towering wind turbines to generate 468 megawatts of power in the shallow waters of Nantucket Sound.
The proposed wind farm, known as “Cape Wind,” would occupy approximately 28 square miles of federal waters roughly equidistant between the summer enclaves of Cape Cod’s south shore and the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. The controversy has raged for over five years and its list of opponents includes a great number of the region’s power elite — I am not referring to electric utility leaders, but a veritable who’s who of leading politicians, media giants and wealthy celebrities.
A recent book on the subject, Cape Wind -Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound, by Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb (reviewed in these pages in May) provides a disturbing view of the region’s alternative energy future. As the book’s subtitle suggests, on Cape Cod there is so much money, celebrity, class and politics involved, it is not surprising that people cannot seemingly agree on any of the underlying “facts.” If there is any consolation to those interested in Maine island wind power, it may be that that most summer people who are attracted to Maine are generally interested in remaining as distinctly low-key as the pervading culture of the state. If you want to see and be seen in New England, the shores of the Cape and its islands are a far more forgiving place to demonstrate status than the Maine coast and its islands.
On Cape Cod, the opponents of the Cape Wind project provide the authors with innumerable opportunities to pillory themselves, beginning with Douglas Yearly, the leader of the main “environmental” opposition group, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound. Yearly who owns an oceanfront home in an exclusive Cape Cod town, Osterville, is the retired C.E.O. of Phelps Dodge, the mining company, and a director of Marathon Oil. Yearly presents himself as a serious conservationist interested in “sustainable living” in his a $6.8 million 7,700 square foot home. He says that the prospect of seeing alternative energy turbines on a clear day “offends” him. When journalists turned up the fact that Phelps Dodge, under Yearly’s leadership, had a history of serious pollution violations in New Mexico where the company had an open pit mine, Yearly said, “I consider Nantucket Sound in the same league as the Grand Canyon. Without insulting people in New Mexico, we are not dealing with that kind of beauty there.” Environmentalism, in other words, is protecting your view — a very powerful motivator of political activity, but this definition begs the question of whose “environment” is at stake.
Mitt Romney, former Governor of Massachusetts, also ended up embracing the wind farm opposition’s tar baby. The authors trace Romney’s vehemence against the wind farm to the doorstep of another Nantucket Sound property owner, Richard Egan, one of Romney’s chief financiers, who funneled at least $508,000 through various nonprofit entities to oppose the project. Altogether, opponents raised over $10 million while portraying themselves as a “grassroots organization” dedicated to preserving Nantucket Sound.
Another pair of powerful opponents included two U.S. Senators, John Warner of Virginia, whose first wife, the daughter of Paul Mellon, owned an oceanside estate in sight of the proposed wind farm that Warner still visited, and Ted Kennedy, whose passion for sailing on the waters off Hyannis in view of the wind farm site was well known. Eventually, Warner and Kennedy would corral their Senate colleague, Ted Stevens of Alaska, and together with Stevens’s House protégé Don Young, also from Alaska, the pair of Arctic National Wildlife drilling proponents conspired to insert a deal-killing Cape Wind prohibition in a Coast Guard authorization bill that could not be debated. That is almost how the story ends. Almost, but not quite.
The object of this fury was an entrepreneur named Jim Gordon who was not programmed to walk away from a fight. Any other rational investor might have long since retired from such an ugly battle scene, but Gordon had made a fortune selling various alternative energy companies, including wood chip biomass facilities, and was an unlikely combination of gutsy investor, pugnacious street fighter and alternative energy zealot. During the five years of expensive delaying tactics orchestrated by the Alliance in local municipal, Cape Cod, Massachusetts and federal forums, Gordon had spent some $20 million of his own money in various studies and legal fees defending his project. Not a prescription for the timid.
There are a few heroes in the author’s version of this story, including the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF), Massachusetts’s most powerful environmental advocacy organization, which supported the project from its earliest days. CLF based its support on the fact that wind power would not only take more polluting forms of generating electricity offline, but would also help reduce global warming. Another hero was a Republican Congressman, Charlie Bass of New Hampshire, who challenged the Kennedy-Stevens-Young cabal’s effort to quash the project with a midnight amendment as a terrible precedent for setting the nation’s energy policy, and ultimately rallied by the House and finally the Senate to defeat the provision.
(It is nearly impossible to imagine Olympia Snowe or George Mitchell so tone deaf as to suggest without blushing that wind turbines would mar the view from their families’ vacation ski chalets or coastal haunts.)
No one yet knows the end of this story — will this giant project get permitted and built or not? But the Cape Wind story raises the thorny question of whether history would repeat itself if such a project were proposed for the waters off Casco, Penobscot Blue Hill or Frenchman Bays.
Thankfully we may not have to answer this question any time soon because Maine’s waters are considered too deep to site the giant turbines. But if someday a wind farm is proposed for the waters of the Maine coast, developers should be aware of one of Maine’s immutable rules: in any development proposal for the coast during the past 40 years, when ever summer people have made common cause with local lobstermen, the project is doomed to failure.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.