Relocating the Cape wind farm

GENERALLY SPEAKING, the US Army Corps of Engineers is not widely considered to be a source of good environmental ideas. But last winter, when they released their study of the Cape Wind Associates' proposal to pepper 24 square miles of Nantucket Sound with Statue of Liberty-sized windmills, the Corps suggested that a possible alternative to site the development might be Otis Air National Guard Base and the nearby Massachusetts Military Reservation.

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Hmm, did the engineers know something then that they weren't telling us? Probably not, but the announcement that Otis is on the proposed list for military base closure makes the suggestion of moving the wind farm there worth exploring.

The Corps estimated that the available wind at Otis would be only marginally less than at the Horseshoe Shoals, the proposed offshore site. This naturally made the proponents of the development dismiss it out of hand as economically unfeasible. But even a superficial consideration of the cost of construction and maintenance of a major installation on terra firma not far from a major highway versus one on 130 separate platforms 3 miles offshore suggests that any slight decrease in electrical output would be more than made up in savings. Furthermore, the cost in both dollars and efficiency of getting the power into the grid would be lower from Otis.

More to the point, putting the windmills at Otis would mean that we wouldn't be starting our effort to save ourselves from oil dependency by sticking towers in the middle of what most residents of the Cape and Islands consider a natural and scenic resource that, with all due respect to Wyoming, is more valuable than Yellowstone. We would instead be beginning at the site of the region's greatest environmental catastrophe, turning what has been an ecological sow's ear of toxic plumes and official denial into a green silk purse of clean renewable energy.

Starting on land would also give the political and scientific wheels time to turn so that when and if offshore wind development takes place it doesn't do so in a regulatory vacuum. One of the persistent concerns of many local environmental groups (including the Vineyard Conservation Society, on whose board I serve) has been the lack of a national policy toward near-shore development. If, in fact, it is environmentally appropriate to put a major wind farm in Nantucket Sound, it will still be appropriate to do so in the year or two it will take for Congress to enact a regulatory framework similar to the one that currently exists for oil, gas, and other offshore industrial activity. Why the rush offshore if we can start at Otis?

History argues for wind power. Long before there was an air force base on Cape Cod there were windmills, which were the alternative energy source in a place with so few rivers. There were so many windmills, in fact, that when Thoreau visited in 1849 he called them ''the most foreign and picturesque structures on the Cape." Today, a giant wind farm at Otis would almost certainly become a major tourist attraction in a part of the Cape that is often overlooked.

The old Cape Cod windmills were also a place where retired sailors could get a job, as their skills with ropes and canvas were essential to keeping the vanes trimmed. Today a new wind farm would replace many of the jobs lost from the base closure. Finally, windmills were so expensive that they were often moved from place to place rather than abandoned. Today, if we're smart, we can move the windmills before they're even built, proving that there really is progress.

As for history and the governor's idea of Otis becoming a part of the ever-growing national antiterror establishment, one can only wonder what James Otis of Barnstable might have thought of the prospect of the base named for him being caught up in the same political wave that gave us the Patriot Act, with its licenses to snoop in libraries and elsewhere. John Adams called Otis ''a flame of fire," and credited him with planting the first seed of American independence when he stood up in Boston and denounced King George's efforts to do away with search warrants.

But that's grist for another windmill to grind.

Paul Schneider is the author, most recently, of ''The Enduring Shore: A History of Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket."