Wind Advisory

When I asked Cape Wind's Mark Rodgers what fishermen's groups support the project, he said: "The International Seafarer's Union. It's a commercial fishing group out of New Bedford." Well, no it isn't. Although a few of its members are commercial fishermen, it's basically a union of workers who profit from ocean development and shipping. The fact is that not one recreational or commercial fishing organization supports the wind farm, and most are stridently opposed.

Cape Wind and its allies are correct in their mantra that acid rain and mercury from coal-fired power plants are killing our fish and rendering them unfit to eat. "Climate change and global warming is going to have a tremendous effect on what kinds of fish you find in various areas," declares Rodgers. "This project starts us down the road to a more sustainable and ecologically friendly way to harness our power and in a way that will coexist very well with the other forms of sea life." That statement needs only one little tweak to be 100 percent correct. The word "this" needs to be replaced by "A properly sited." In fact, so important is wind power to our nation that we can't afford to ruin its reputation by allowing our first offshore project to be an ecological and political disaster just because we got impatient and stuck it in the wrong place.

But where's the right place? I put the question to Chris Herter in early August, when I visited him at his trout camp on Idaho's Warm River. Herter is a passionate and committed angler/conservationist who has spent his adult life walking the walk--first, as the New England regional rep for the National Audubon Society, then as director of the Natural Resources Council of Maine, then as a public affairs agent for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, then as an environmental educator for the National Park Service. Currently, he's president of Linekin Bay Energy Co., a firm that is developing the Northern Maine Wind Energy Station--a windfarm in Maine's potato country that will produce slightly more energy than Cape Wind. The 225 turbines will all be on private land, so there won't be an National Environmental Policy Act review, although the Fish and Wildlife Service will be checking for migratory bird mortality.

"For wildlife reasons we do not want to be on ridge lines like everyone else," said Herter. "All wind projects, no matter where they are, kill birds. The question becomes how many, what kinds, and is the mortality 'acceptable.' One of the ways to determine this is your ability to find dead birds. That's a function of scavenger rates and a function of how diligently you go out and check. In the ocean you have no way of knowing how many birds you're killing." Maine's potato country is not known for its bird migrations. Nantucket Sound, on the other hand, is smack in the middle of one of the East's major migration corridors for all kinds of seabirds, shorebirds, raptors and passerines, including threatened and endangered species. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission warns of the possibility of "significant mortality."

Getting no answers from the Corps or Cape Wind to my questions about wind farm economics, I turned to Herter. "We're not intentionally competing with Cape Wind," he said. "However, we happen to believe that doing it on the land makes more sense than in the ocean. For example, there's routine maintenance. A turbine goes down, a blade comes off, how are you going to go out and fix it in the middle of February? Especially in summer, wind off the New England coast is very inactive from dawn until, say 11:30 am. On land there's tax revenue to the town, revenue to the property owner--a whole series of trickle-down economic measures."

And there is speculation that Nantucket Sound's major attraction as a site--apart from it being in an area essentially free of regulation where public water can be monopolized free of charge--is that the location entitles Cape Wind to lavish subsidies. Massachusetts has a system called "the Renewable Portfolio Standard" that creates a market-based system where utilities trade "green credits" and requires utilities to provide an increasing percentage of electricity from renewable sources. From this source Cape Wind will haul in something like $40 million a year, conceivably for the life of the project. And for the first decade it will get an alternative-energy "production tax credit" from the feds that amounts to $29 million per year. That's another good reason anglers and even yachters shouldn't feel guilty about questioning the wind farm--they'll be paying for a lot of its operation.

With a few notable exceptions (such as the Massachusetts Audubon Society, which has grave concerns about bird deaths) environmental groups that haven't come out in favor of the Cape Wind project seem singularly unconcerned about threats to Nantucket Sound's fish and wildlife. Having worked closely with these organizations in the past, I know that this is aberrant behavior and can only conclude that they are afraid of getting painted with the elitist-hypocritical-NIMBY brush.

As for enviros promoting the project, they seem committed to America's eat-anything-you-want energy diet. Not a whisper from them about the smartest and cheapest alternative of all--energy conservation. In the best of all possible scenarios Cape Wind will assuage about one percent of New England's energy demand, producing about 170 megawatts. But a study commissioned by the Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships reveals that achievable energy conservation could produce a demand saving of 4,317 megawatts by 2008. According to the study, "cost-effective investments in energy efficiency can more than offset projected electric energy and peak demand growth, deferring the need for 28 combined-power plants of 300-megawatts in output each by 2013."

That's not to say that every little bit of juice dribbled into the New England power grid isn't important. But why is America rushing to pour more energy into such grids before it makes even a token effort to stem the outflow? Before we make an industrial park out of the best fishing area on the East Coast, it might make sense to, for example, flip off baseball-field lights that blaze for hours after the last out, cool it with the neon signs, turn down air-conditioning in office buildings so employees don't have to wear sweaters in summer, unplug the phalanxes of street lights along rural stretches of highway that do nothing but blind you, legislate a few gasoline-efficiency requirements, enact an energy bill that isn't political payola for the coal industry, the utilities and Big Oil--that sort of stuff.