Tim Lasker Equivocates & Deceives on Wind

Tomorrow, Tuesday Sept. 16th, we have an election here (I am a resident of West Tisbury on the island of Martha’s Vineyard). It’s to nominate the Democrat who will run for an open seat in the State Legislature.

Last week the paper of record for the locals, The Martha’s Vineyard Times, had a useful review by Steve Myrick of the available candidates’ views on three questions: 1) should we open a local gambling casino; 2) Cape Wind, good or bad and what are you doing for renewables; and 3) what are your legislative priorities?

I was pleased to note that at least one candidate (Dan Larkosh) boldly supports the Cape Wind project, yet was flabbergasted at the lack of sophistication and dishonesty embedded in the reasons the demurring candidates give for opposing Cape Wind.

2. Do you support or oppose Cape Wind, and what action will you take to meet the future energy needs of Martha’s Vineyard?

Roger Wey:

I oppose Cape Wind because of the adverse economic, environmental, and public safety impacts it would have. I would support other wind programs …

This rote litany is a typical response among local opponents of Cape Wind: ‘I favor renewables and wind in general but do not like Cape Wind and especially do not like its location because …’ So socially acceptable are certain green ideas and behaviors (regardless of personal action) that the response is like answering the when-did-you-last-beat-your-wife-question. An opponent is best served answering a different question, or simply lying.

Mr Wey would be dismayed to hear that the “reasons” are not reasons at all; and they give just as much rationale for having a Cape Wind …

Economic: Cape Wind creates jobs, saves fossil fuels, helps reduce long-term energy costs;

Environmental: Cape Wind may reduce the fishing-out of the Nantucket Sound (the damage to fish has been historically done BY THE FISHERMEN! There are, for example, no Cod left in the waters around Cape Cod!) and certianly will reduce the risk of oil-spill holocaust around the Cape & Islands;

Public Safety: I honestly don’t know what to say here. Does Mr Wey fear some risk that a turbine could fall on someone’s head? If so, the problem remains sophistic & ill-defined.

Mr Wey has just said the equivalent of, “I favor clean energy, but I do not favor clean energy.” And we are left to wonder why, in truth, Mr Wey doesn’t want Cape Wind.

But at least in Tim Lasker’s case, there are enough clues that we don’t need to speculate …

Tim Lasker:

I strongly favor development of sustainable energy resources such as wind, but in its current formulation I have to oppose Cape Wind. The electricity from Cape Wind would go into the national grid and be sold to the highest bidder. The project may profit venture capitalists, but it will certainly not benefit the residents of Martha’s Vineyard. [emphasis added]

I support the creation of a municipally owned wind utility that would supply the Vineyard with electricity. Dukes County could create a wind farm on Nomans Land, with 12 giga-turbines, on approximately a fifth of the land, and generate enough electricity for the entire island. Our bills would be at least 25 percent less annually and our carbon footprint a lot smaller.

A utility of this kind currently operates in Hull, Massachusetts, where the city owns wind turbines. Unlike Cape Wind, Hull’s wind farm was readily embraced by the citizens. This shows how local control and tangible economic benefit can lead to broader acceptance of alternative energy sources.

Let me repeat that rhetorical howler for its principal misstatement of fact and its paradox: Tim Lasker said, “The electricity from Cape Wind would go into the national grid and be sold to the highest bidder. The project may profit venture capitalists, but it will certainly not benefit the residents of Martha’s Vineyard.”

This is not the way electricity or finance work and Tim Lasker — a wind energy entrepreneur — knows better. It is a lie designed to pray on common ignorance through repetition of a meme to which many local individuals have known sensitivity: “corporations and rich men are going to take advantage of you, steal your electricity which belongs to you, spoil your environment and wreck everything.”

Firstly, the electricity from Cape Wind will not go into “the national grid”; while it can do (and that’s a good thing) most electricity is consumed in the region of its source. And yes, electricity is a commodity the price of which is discovered through orders crossing on an orderly, open and free market. These are all to the good. We should be proud of this. Anyone who is not is either a socialist, a communist or a knave.

In fact, electricity from Cape Wind will enter the grid at Barnstable on the Cape where it will be allocated regionally by the New England ISO (New England Independent Systems Operators, according to a highly complicated system involving long-term contracts and the purchase and sales of electricity day to day on the spot market). The difficulty and obscurity of this mechanism (see Cape Wind’s “How the Electric Power Pool Works“) enables Tim Lasker’s disinformation to emanate with impugnity.

Also of fact, the electricity from Cape Wind will most likely be used locally on the Cape and Islands. What Tim Lasker doesn’t want you to know is that the presence of a new source of electricity coming from Cape Wind (that’s renewable energy with a zero-cost input) will enable other electricity that’s generated from regional utilitities up-state to be traded on the spot market and sent away if supply and demand here and there so accord. When electricity is sourced here, it frees capacity elsewhere in the state which used to come down here; Cape Wind will reduce the risk of rolling blackouts here and up-state like, for example, on those hot summer days when the New England ISO couldn’t find enough natural gas on the spot market. Cape Wind will enable the NE ISO to meet our needs and those of the region better AND with lower exposure to fossil fuel costs and cost fluctuations.

This impacts us directly. Electricity, like money, is fungible: a dollar is a dollar, a kilowatt a kilowatt. The stuff can move around freely, so who cares where it comes from? Well, actually we care a great deal that the power coming from the turbines in our Nantucket Sound benefits us. Wind power now is still expensive but it brings an important indirect cost-benefit by reducing our exposure to fossil fuel cost volatility (assuming wind power gets at least as much subsidy as fossil fuels continue to receive). This we experience here in our homes on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. Perhaps it requires more sophistication than we generally possess to understand the direct and indirect mechanisms in play to our benefit on a large scale wind project.

Tim Lasker knows this (and therefore knows his opposition to Cape Wind stands on soft ground) because among the many interesting and valid business activities on his CV is a recent enterprise called Swift Wind Energy LLC, “a company focused on new wind technology for commercial and home use.”

True to his word on this small point, Tim Lasker is evidently a genuine & sincere supporter of (local) wind energy. So what are the real reasons for his opposition to Cape Wind? Is it (mis-)perceived competition? And what in particular is objectionable about venture capitalists in this context? Are those the same guys who haven’t recognized the viability of Mr Lasker’s roof-top turbine concepts? Is he praying on the common jealousy of the start-up financing class?

I guarantee you that without substantial profit incentives associated with these large-scale renewables projects our nation’s adventure with the renewable energy revolution will pan out to have been a mere flirtation.

Notwithstanding his interesting ideas for local wind facilities (which should and must be explored), Tim Lasker is wrong about Cape Wind and he’s lying about about the facts.

Tom Friedman on Fresh Air

On NPR this week, Terry Gross talks to Tom Friedman, who’s promoting his new book: Hot, Flat & Crowded.

Under the lead, Thomas Friedman’s Argument for ‘Geo-Greenism’, they cover TF’s disgust with John McCain, who …

a) didn’t show up for any of 8 different Senate votes for the PTC; and

b) voted for this summer’s gas tax holiday

[It makes McCain's recent embrace of 'Change' rhetoric sound insincere.]

TF also expresses disappointment that Obama’s energy strategy ’seem like he’s checking off boxes’.

Terry asks who are the enablers in the US addiction to oil, and I was disappointed to hear TF mention first the oil companies — a standard & weak victimization line, as if we are their hostages (which I do not believe to be the case) … the alternative energy revolution will come from incentives (leadership) and innovation (either Danish or American can-do-ism) together and it doesn’t matter what the oil companies do — apart from the world oil market’s pricing mechanisms). And when the people want to change behavior, lobbying goes only so far.

There’s more. Enjoy …

Sierra Club Head Equivocates on Wind

It is perplexing and disturbing that, Carl Pope, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club (the organization whose mission is ostensibly to protect the planet), ends his Aug 1 interview with Mike Seccombe of The Vineyard Gazette by echoing the hollow Not-In-My-Back-Yard (NIMBY) refrain against Cape Wind.

It aligns Carl Pope and the Sierra Club by extension with one of the principal hypocrisies — tools of inertia — that has delayed the first US offshore wind farm (and all the others behind it) for several years now and which has cost citizens of Massachusetts and the United States untolled billions in preserving the commitment to fossil fuels.

“You need strength to deal with vested interests like that.” Another example Mr. Pope points to is the Cape Wind development.

“You will see people come out and say ‘Yes, I’m in favor of wind, but not where I am.’ And I have a lot of questions for people here about Cape Wind, which the Sierra Club supported after studying it for a long time.

“Now, I don’t know myself if Cape Wind is in the best place in this region for wind turbines. There might have been a better place.

“If so, I would be fine with the people of this region saying ‘Here’s our wind site and it’s big and we’re going to make it really easy to build there.’

“As long as people take responsibility for what they need. It’s not a question of moving the burden to someone else,” Mr. Pope said.

One would think Carl Pope would have caught the interleaving paradoxes (and even the psychological transference) of that Charlie-Parker-like improvisational run across the chords; he — more than most others — should be expected to have committed the necessary time to understand the long work, preparation and technical as well as business merit of Jim Gordon’s plan to locate Cape Wind on the Horseshoe Shoal. Even though Mr Pope says the Sierra Club has studied the situation, it is painfully evident in his words that he has neither grasped the details nor the likelihood that Horseshoe Shoal will be exploited along with all the other shallow-water venues around the Cape & Islands for wind power, eventually.

You can see how the shallow water of the Horseshoe Shoal represents an ideal location for the Cape Wind turbines: not too close but not too far from the electricity grid, out of the flight paths and clearly away from principal maritime navigational channels. These facts have been ignored by opponents who continue to cite flight-path and maritime navigational issues (which only exist for private sailors) as reasons to delay and kill the project.

Clean, renewable wind power: this is not a trifle.

The list of NIMBY-ists has heretofore consisted of the members of the Oyster Harbors Club and the news editors, retired news icons, and state and national elected officials of the Cape & Islands who either sail in the Nantucket Sound themselves or vainly cater to the embedded interests of Osterville and environs.

Heading the list are people who are national institutions in their own right: Bunny Mellon (she, not Jackie O, redecorated Camelot), Bill Koch (America’s Cup winner of yore, “art” collector, legacy of Koch Industries and Fossil All-Star as principal of the Oxbow Group, a heavy player in Old energy), Ted Kennedy (who carried their water in Congress), Mitt Romney (to whom the Governor’s veto on Cape Wind — proposed in the secret language entered in conference committee to the failed Young-Stevens-Kennedy amendment to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 — would have handed Cape Wind’s demise) and other non-entities & baggage-handlers.

Aesthetic objections to the placement of Cape Wind deserve recognition. Moreover, it is understandable that individuals who learned to sail their Wianno Senior sloops in the Nantucket Sound — no matter how privileged — would have visceral reactions against a large industrial project placed on the special & historic waters of their formative adolescent passage. It is even touching to consider this, as we have heard both Kennedys — Bobby & Teddy — sputtering incoherently on the radio and on the Senate floor in their mad rejection of the thought of Jim Gordon’s personal assault on their emotional plane.

Yet the merits of the Cape Wind project are so well-grounded in energy and utility terms, and so serious in their meaning for the future of our country and these coming generations, that the strong feeling of a few is simply and justifiably blown away. The merits of Cape Wind, in its proposed Horseshoe Shoal location, are overwhelming.

Add to merit the fact that many people — particularly those technology natives under a certain age — like the look & feel of wind turbines. Aesthetic opponents, we may find, are elderly conservatives who either repel from change of any kind or have never seen these glorious white things in the flesh. It was my neighbor on Music Street — an old 17th-Century Martha’s Vineyard name — who reminded me that there was conservative opposition in the 1950s & 1960s to the introduction in West Tisbury and Chilmark of the unsightly telephone poles.

And so, it is surprising to see Mr Pope willingly adding his own and the Sierra Club’s names to this traitors’ list of NIMBY-ists. And this may come to reflect that he doesn’t talk enough to the 18- to 28-year olds who are not captured in the polls and who are about to give Obama the coming historic landslide.

Mr Pope, what is the Sierra Club’s position on Cape Wind and on clean, renewable wind power in general?

Your words betray an alignment with entrenched fossil fuel interests, and your uncertainty may stifle our nation’s swift progress toward national security. You sound just like the soulless Mitt (the -Crit) Romney, that hollow being, hair perfectly sculpted as he sonorously decries the benefits of wind- and other renewable forms of power, while hurling menacing sliders up and under the chin of Jim Gordon.

How is it so? There is no opening here for pensive hedging. Have you considered the damage this does to your credibility & your position? You — and others — can’t have it both ways because time is of the essence.

Birds & Cape Wind

Among the resounding merits of Cape Wind will be its indirect impact on the whole Cape & Islands ecosystem, for it will reduce the amount of oil shipped through the Cape Cod Canal as the electricity grid absorbs its renewable megawatts and moth-balls the fossil fuel-driven power plants (polluting the air) at the hoof of the Cape.

While this will be a subtle, yet substantial and certain benefit to wildlife in the region, it is not an easy point for the myopic or those with entrenched interests to digest.

Although turbines kill birds — it’s impossible for a reasonable person to doubt this — there is a distinct lack of perspective on the bird impact from wind utilities.

For example, in 2006 we heard of the demise of nine white-tailed eagles in 10 months in the area of the Smola islands off the coast of Norway, of the reported reduction in sightings of breeding pairs there from 19 to one.

No one is asking whether these particular eagles have been dashed insensate into the waves by the murderous blades spinning those diabolical Vestas turbines or whether the 18 sets of white-tailed eagle mates have prudently decided to relocate. Perhaps white-tailed eagles are smarter than we credit them.

And what about the other birds in general being regularly killed by cars, or by buildings? Or those mowed out of the air by latter-day hunter-gatherers hidden in camouflage, benefited by bird-voice-spoofing technologies and loaded to their polyethylene waders with explosive cartridges? I’m lacking a count here from the bird-concerned.

Yes, Cape Wind — and the many many wind farms that are eventually implemented in its wake in and around the coastal waters of the United States — will most certainly have a positive net impact on birds.

Why? Because it will reduce the risk of this …

… a cormorant pulled from the May 2003 oil spill at Buzzards Bay.

So, indeed, you can imagine how tolerance for the bird issue in connection with Cape Wind is low among observers with even modest intelligence or the slightest sensitivity to common sense.

Understanding $100 $200 Oil

Back in Spring (March 2008), I made an attempt to grasp and lay out in 500 words or less the factors influencing the $100 world-market oil price in “Understanding $100 Oil.”

Mine remains a crude understanding, but I was right about the basic components:

• high and increasing global demand;
• prospective supply limitations (though no immediate supply shortage);
• a 25-year underinvestment in production;
• regional political unrest & nationalization of oil production; and
• intertemporal financial factors (including the weak dollar [gluttonous US consumption + Iraq!] and record funds flows into commodities, including oil derivatives).

Meanwhile, the oil expert’s expert and author of The Prize: the Epic Quest for Oil Money & Power, Daniel Yergin, took the chance to catch us up on his read of the oil situation …

Daniel Yergin | “Oil has reached a turning point” | The Financial Times | 27 May 2008.

Yes, it’s another oil shock, he says, but one that’s different in character from our experience in the 1970’s. This one is a demand shock. And oil supply is slow in responding for several reasons: prices haven’t been that high for all that long and the cost of getting crude out of the Earth and refining it has more than doubled in the last four years!

Yes, the current high oil price may be a demand shock triggered by what had been several years of excellent global economic growth, and thus more benign than supply shocks caused by 1970s-style disruptions. It is amplified by a dollar shock caused by the fall in the dollar and by the embrace by financial investors of oil (and other commodities) as an asset class.

Mr Oil continues …

Oil supply, one might think, should be responding [to record-high prices]. Yet there are three obstacles. The first is time. These high prices have not been around all that long and development of new supplies takes many years. The second is access to new resources. And the third factor is what is happening to costs. The public focuses on the price at the pump, but the oil industry is preoccupied, and indeed somewhat stymied, by how rapidly their own costs are rising – far exceeding the rate of general inflation. The latest IHS/Cambridge Energy Research Associates (Cera) Upstream Capital Cost Index – the consumer price index for the oilfield – shows that costs for developing a new oil or natural gas field have more than doubled in four years. Some costs have risen even more: a deep-water drill ship might have cost $125,000 per day to rent four years ago. Today it goes for more than $600,000 per day – if you can find one.

A pause.

I would like people to understand that beating up on the oil companies — which are making record profits at present — is not a helpful or productive response, as attractive a reflex as it may be. We in the United States consume about 20 million barrels of oil a day, of which almost 7 million we produce ourselves. This leaves the rest, which we get either from people who don’t like us or from people who take more dollars US than they used to for the same horse blanket (or both; the long overdue Oil Security movement is predicated on these bedrock facts). Oil companies are our best friend, Kimosabe. Why? Because they produce oil. We use a lot of it … more than anybody else, in fact.

They are not the bad guy here. In this flick, they are the love-interest. It is not clear whether the oil companies are gouging at the pump or if they may be pricing even lower than before relative to the new challenges and higher costs of gaining supply. (For example, it is not clear if the $4.79 I spent this week on Regular fully reflects today’s $144 crude price or some blended lower price based on the older, lower-cost inventory in the production chain. We’ll need to ask our friends at Exxon Mobile or Royal Dutch Shell to help us toward a better understanding of the liquid’s odyssey from the ground to the filling station. It is entirely likely that the $144 barrel would cause a $5 – $8 pump price if the global market persists for a long time.)

What the oil companies will do with high prices is invest … and innovate. That’s why the Peak Oil theory — so appealing to the the bolshy tree hugger or those of limited sensibility seeking faith in a reason for all this chaos in the markets — is questionable.

The idea of a fixed oil supply is a misunderstanding; there is a difference between Total Oil Actually Present and Total Oil We Can Get With Current Means. The history of the oil industry is a sequence of new approaches to sourcing oil in clever ways which have either reduced the cost of certain processes or enlarged the definition of In-Ground Reserves by increasing yields with new techniques (steam injection is one that comes easily to mind). The amount of oil “in the ground” “increases” over time because we are enterprising, competitive & thinking beings coming up with new ways to access what had been inaccessible before. This confuses the heck out of people who’s understanding is limited to the idea that the Earth is running out of oil. Of course it is! But sometimes it’s not, depending on oil company grit, resources & fortunes.

The ideas of windfall profits taxes (arbitrary penalties slapped on oil companies) and summer tax holidays (a temporary halt in the 18.5% federal gas tax) have come up in the primary elections. McCain made the holiday proposal and Hillary followed up in support. Luckily Barack Obama has a compass:

“This isn’t an idea designed to get you through the summer, it’s designed to get them through an election.”

It surprises people no end when I tell them that the high oil price makes OPEC and the oil companies more nervous than anybody. It’s the demand, stupid! They don’t want to see it go down. But it is, already.

It’s far better to beat up on ourselves than on the oil companies (riding the bike more at these pump prices is hardly flagellation): use less oil and less of other non-renewables and do whatever is necessary to replace imported oil first with renewable sources.

As Daniel Yergin points out, the new higher costs of oil production are an important factor in today’s startling price; this additionally makes the $200 barrel seem plausible, even likely. And cost pressure will sustain fuel prices for a long, long time — at least several years.

The silver lining — there is always a silver lining — may be that high non-renewables prices is precisely the thing to support a strong move into the best renewable sources of energy and out of what Massachusetts Governor, Deval Patrick, called today “the fossil fuel age”.

It’s up to us. Think of oil as the reference price we need to beat. It won’t always be so easy, but the path is clear for now.

Mr Yergin concludes …

The break point is already here. Oil is in the process of losing its almost total domination in ground transport. It is not going to fade away soon – such is the scale of its use and convenience, it will retain a dominant position for many years. But it will share the transport market with other sources as never before, reinforced by a new drive for fuel efficiency.

Deval Patrick Signs in Energy Bill for Massachusetts

Read the Massachusetts Governor’s OpEd piece today …

Deval Patrick | “A clean break from the fossil fuel age” | The Boston Globe | 2 Jul 2008

By choice and necessity, the fossil fuel age is coming to an end. Think of this as a shift in an “age,” not merely a shift in resource. The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stone, but because humankind had a better idea. Clean energy is today’s better idea – better for people’s pocketbooks, the economy, and the planet.

Local Progress on Martha’s Vineyard

“Small host of wind turbines is in the research and planning stages” | Janet Hefler | The Martha’s Vineyard Times | 12 Jun 2008.

Some of the obstacles to 20%-Wind include the local community approvals processes. Neighbors are tending to be a significant early source of objections based on the turbine noise problem. Although people say visual aesthetics are also objectionable, a good number of folks say too they like the way wind turbines look.

I had this same personal reaction on a European trip in 2003. On the train from Brussels to Hannover, we saw the wind turbines as we crossed the border into Germany in the lovely rolling hillside farmlands of Aachen (the university town). It was a surprise to me and quite a mystery: as the quiet train smoothly coursed the valley all you could see at first were these strange white wing-tips arcing passed on the other side of the hill. These great white wind turbines came into view as we crested the ridge; they looked to me that instant like animated dinosaurs aligned across the landscape with slow-moving arms.

It is my belief that the aesthetic objection — like the opposition to Cape Wind from home-owners concerned about their view of the Nantucket Sound — will subside as wind turbines become commonplace.

GE’s Growing Turbine Backlog

General Electric’s backlog of wind turbines has grown to $12 billion, up from $11 billion in the fourth quarter and twice that of a year ago, writes Micheal Kanellos of CNet.

This was one of the silver-lining notes from Jeff Immelt upon the company’s dismal quarterly earnings release back in April.

One negative for turbine producers is that profit margins in the fast-growing wind turbine business are shrinking as the market attracts new competition. Danish market leader, Vestas, has already confirmed this.

We Can Do This …

Cape Wind’s release by Mark Rogers begins …

The United States can increase its use of wind power over the next two decades to supply twenty percent of the nation’s electricity without any technological breakthroughs, according to a first-of-its-kind report (PDF) issued by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) last month.

That’s without any technological breakthroughs. No new innovations required.

This means that we can achieve 20%-Wind without waiting for a silver bullet from MIT, a magic new discovery, or the overthrow of Quantum Mechanics.

We can do this for our kids … if for no one else.

Wind Will Power Our Future

The following is a reprint of an op-ed piece by Mark Rogers, Communications Director of Cape Wind, the private-sector organization presently proposing the first off-shore wind-farm in the United States on Horseshoe Shoal in the Nantucket Sound south of Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

The United States can increase its use of wind power over the next two decades to supply twenty percent of the nation’s electricity without any technological breakthroughs, according to a first-of-its-kind report issued by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) last month.

The report entitled, “20% Wind Energy by 2030″ [PDF, link not provided in the original -ed.], forecasts that target can be met with 300 gigawatts of installed wind power in the United States assuming that electric demand also increases by 39 percent.

According to the report, the DOE expects coastal states to harness 50,000 megawatts of offshore wind in shallow water depths of less than 100 feet. The report notes for some coastal states (like Massachusetts) shallow water offshore wind can provide 100 percent of the electricity supply.

The DOE further states that increasing the use of wind power to supply 20 percent of the nation’s electricity would reduce carbon dioxide emissions (that contribute to climate change) from the electricity generation sector by 25 percent while creating up to a half million new American jobs.

This increased use of wind power would allow the U.S. to reduce its use of natural gas by 50 percent and its use of coal by 18 percent to generate electricity, according to the DOE, and this would improve energy independence and national security. The report notes that without this increased use of wind power the U.S. would substantially increase its use of natural gas for electricity generation, with heavy reliance upon imported liquid natural gas (the greatest suppliers of which will be Iran, Qatar and Russia).

Finally, the DOE notes that increased use of wind power will benefit Americans by making the price of the energy more stable and less vulnerable to the price volatility seen from fossil fuels. While the cost of building all new forms of electrical generation including wind power has increased considerably, at least the fuel cost of wind will always be stable, at zero.

Locally, some have argued that we should put aside shallow water offshore wind projects and instead wait for deepwater projects. The U.S. Department of Energy takes a very different view in its new report:

“Shallow water wind turbine projects have been proposed and could be followed by transitional and finally deepwater turbines. These paths should not be considered as mutually exclusive choices. Because there is a high degree of interdependence among them, they should be considered a sequence of development that builds from a shallow water foundation of experience and knowledge to the complexities of deeper water.”

We at Cape Wind were pleased recently to see that over 41,000 (of the 42,000) written comments received by the Minerals Management Service on their Environmental Impact Statement were in support of our project moving forward. While we recognize that in this day in age that any energy infrastructure project will face opposition, we note that two recent independent polls found statewide support for Cape Wind at 86 percent and that support on the Cape and Islands is growing.

We hope to complete permitting by the end of this year, and we look forward to one day providing 75 percent of the electricity needs of the Cape and Islands from the clean and inexhaustible winds on Horseshoe Shoal.

As America’s first offshore wind farm, Cape Wind would help make Massachusetts a global leader in offshore renewable energy while also helping the United States move toward the goal of supplying 20 percent of its electricity from the power of wind.

Cape Wind Associates, LLC
75 Arlington Street; Suite 704
Boston, MA 02116
phone: 617-904-3100
fax: 617-904-3109