Offshore Wind Blocked
Offshore wind power, which until quite recently seemed to be coming to the Northeast, hit a stumbling block in the past few months. First, in mid-December, the Long Island Power Authority rejected a plan for turbines in the waters about 30 miles east of Montauk. Then, early this month, the utilities that would have bought power from a proposed $2.5 billion project being readied for Nantucket Sound by a firm called Cape Wind backed away, citing missed deadlines by the developer.
LIPA’s board decision has a potentially direct impact on East Hampton Town, which has vowed to get 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. More broadly, the projects were seen as bellwethers for an improved long-term energy strategy for the region — and the country. In wind’s place, LIPA has said it will develop solar generation plants, but at most, it said, these will produce about half of the 280 megawatts of clean energy it had once set as a goal.
Some powerful people funded by fossil fuel interests, such as David Koch, have celebrated the apparent end of Cape Wind’s Nantucket Sound effort. They say this represents a break for ratepayers and a triumph of the free market. Looked at from another perspective it seems that those who tied up the project in the courts can claim the real victory.
In the 12 years since its Nantucket Sound proposal, Cape Wind has been buffeted by more than two dozen lawsuits. These were so frequent that a fed-up federal judge wrote in May that the opponents were engaged in “a vexatious abuse of the democratic process” by continuing to seek to overturn decisions by the Massachusetts governor, Legislature, public agencies, and other courts.
Coal-burning electric plants remain the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Utilities operate with government oversight to one degree or another, and officials are going to have to force them to adapt to alternatives that may be more costly but are essential, including wind.
A progressive energy future will require leadership and incentives from Washington in the form of tax credits to allow alternatives to compete with cheaper, heavily subsidized oil and coal.
The bottom line is that wind is a clean source that can provide a large part of the country’s needed electrical generation, and it must be allowed to do so.