Cape Wind: Power trumps the powerful

last updated 8 January 2015

For once, the elite lost, said Mark Clayton in The Christian Science Monitor. “After nearly a decade of battles pitting Massachusetts’ Cape and island residents, Indian tribes, and influential politicians against one another and project developers,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar last week approved the nation’s first offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound. The Cape Wind project plans 130 wind turbines, each extending 400 feet above the water, in plain view of some of the priciest real estate in the country—the summer playgrounds of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket. The windmills, expected to produce electricity to power roughly 200,000 homes, were opposed at every step by “wealthy, waterfront property owners who cared more about their private distant ocean view” than about America’s energy security, said Walter Brooks in Cape Cod Today. Affluent hypocrites, aided by local politicians “beholden” to them and to their fellow millionaire Ted Kennedy, opposed the plan, even though “99.9 percent of all the residents of Cape Cod” will never see those turbines six miles out at sea—unless they’re invited for cocktails at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport.

We’re “huge fans of wind power,” said the Boston Herald in an editorial, “but in the appropriate place and at a sustainable cost. Cape Wind fails on both these scores.” The enormous turbines will be visually intrusive and interfere with fishing, pleasure boating, and maritime traffic. Due to the high engineering costs of sea-based wind power, “this will be among the most expensive sources of energy ever devised by mankind.” Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says Cape Wind–generated electricity will cost 27 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with an average electricity-generating cost of 12 cents. And the cost will only rise as this legal battle goes into “extra innings.” Despite Salazar’s announcement that “this is the final decision” of the government, “it ain’t over till it’s over.”

In other words, “gentlemen, start your lawsuits,” said Neil Steinberg in the Chicago Sun-Times. The waterfront worthies of Nantucket Sound simply won’t tolerate windmills on their horizon—even if the project has been studied exhaustively for nine years now. How sad: If we are ever to break our dependence on foreign oil, collective sacrifice is required. But in “gazing out to sea, reflecting on the splendor of their lives,” some folks manage never to lose sight of their own righteous sense of entitlement.