A step forward for Cape Wind

RIGHT ON! New England deserves wind power the same as the people in Denmark and most of Europe have...and now that the naysayers and self-interested folk who oppose this vital project have lost in court, let's move ahead together and bring wind power to our shores to power our homes and businesses with non-polluting wind energy. It's now time to forget opposition and start supporting Cape Wind and more projects to stop our reliance on oil.

Cape Wind will never happen. Ted Kennedy is more worried about the view out his window then he is about renewable energy.

There will always be some "other" place to put a wind farm. But that is all; always another location, another project an enviromental study.

But there will never be an actual shovel stuck into the ground! Solar power and wind power use huge areas of land; the enviromentalist who control the Democrats will never allow it!

Renewable energy is a smoke screeen. It is the matra for those whose only plan is to use less energy. They try to sugar coat that by saying some new green energy technology is "just around the corner".

No matter how you slice it, this project will be in the courts for years. I undertsand that the windmills are so far from land that they appear only as a slight blur on the horizon. I am so sorry for the dumb - or nearsighted, perhaps - birds that fly into the slowly turning blades. Birds fly into the plate glass windows in my house all the time - THUMP! - should we stop building houses, or tear down the ones we have, and go back to the caves? ( After the oil is gone, in 30 - 40 years, and after we have sent our national wealth to the sheiks and Hugo Chavezes, we might as well do so. We will most certainly have slipped to the status of a third-world country.

My sister lives in a conservative, rural farming town in upstate NY that has 200 wind turbines on a ridge just outside of town. It's an amazing sight. The farmers whose land was used for the wind farm were compensated generously, which has had a tremendous impact on the local economy, and the clean energy that is produced is plugged into a grid that serves the entire state. Those who say clean energy is a smoke screen and who think the investment in renewable energy sources is somehow not worth it is living in the last century. The world's growing population cannot sustain our dwindling supply of resources and it is utterly baffling to me how the argument is still being made in 2008 when we are paying $4.15 for a gallon of gas that "mantras" like alternative fuels and solar and wind energy are unrealistic pipe dreams. Consider this: 1 MW of wind generation capacity alone (each turbine in Maple Ridge, NY has a capacity of 1.65 MW) can offset or displace the conventional generation of carbon dioxide equivalent to one square mile of forest. New York State is on target to have 25% of its electricity come from renewable energy by 2010. If they can do it, why can't we?

The only people who have an argument in this matter are the fishermen. I went to a discussion between Audra Parker of the Alliance and Mark Rogers from Cape Wind. Mark made a very good point by saying the people who are against the project were against it from the very beginning. While the people that are for the project (like the Auduban Society) made sure to do their research before signing on. I have heard it many times "we are not against renewable energy, just a wind farm in the Sound." It's a case of NIMBY (not in my backyard). If the Republicans have their way it will be offshore drilling that we'll be looking at rather than wind farms.

On April 21, 2008 US FWS provided to Dr. Cluck, Cape Wind Project Manager of MMS, this statement in their comments on the Cape Wind MMS DEIS:

“The current framework that MMS is proposing would forgo refinement of pre-construction study protocols and set in motion an adaptive management process that would be doomed to failure because effective techniques to perform post-construction monitoring simply do not exist.”

The federal regulator, US FWS, DEIS comments indicate that MA Audubon’s Adaptive Management condition of their support for Cape Wind, “Challenge” press release, is a fatally flawed $8 million dollar, bird carcass counting (future) contract, for future service, featuring tools that “do not exist”, (to count dead birds over water.

AM “sets in motion an adaptive management process that would be "doomed to failure” is the statement of the federal regulator USFWS in their MMS Cape Wind DEIS response.

The President of MA Audubon, Laura A. Johnson, submitted MA Audubon’s comments on the Cape Wind DEIS on February 23, 2005 to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers:

“By utilizing other bird mortality data provided in the DEIS, Mass Audubon staff scientists arrived at avian mortalities that ranged from 2,300 to 6,600 collision deaths per year.”

'A step forward for Cape Wind' is a step backwards for public safety.

The testimony you won't find in the Boston Globe regarding Cape Wind:

Congress.org:

http://www.congress.org/congressorg/bio/userletter/?id=297&letter_id=1208243361

MA Audubon's "Challenge" calls for monitoring and mitigation techniques that do not exist to reduce risk to wildlife by Cape Wind towers post construction. The implementation of AM is handled by service contract. MA Audubon provides the AM contract term length in “Challenge” “beginning at the construction phase and continuing for at least three years post-construction”.

Monitoring and mitigation service, payable by Cape Wind and others if Cape Wind is permitted, represents a future AM contract value of approximately $8 million dollars if Cape Wind is permitted and construction begins.

MA Audubon's top brass, Jack Clarke and Taber Allison, refuse to admit that AM is handled by service contract as the future $8 million dollar contract condition of their support for Cape Wind.