Controversy Over Wind Farm Roils Predictable Nantucket

The sea surrounds this slender slip of land, and the wind blows strong and steady. For centuries, Nantucket has derived its livelihood from both resources, sending ships to distant ports and drawing visitors from around the world. Now the wind and the water off Nantucket are at the center of their own fierce storm.

An entrepreneurial energy company, Cape Wind Associates, wants to place 170 turbine windmills in pristine Nantucket Sound, providing a potential peak hourly output of 420 megawatts, roughly the amount used by all of Cape Cod, along with the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.

Elsewhere in New England, 10 other wind-power projects are under consideration, including a windmill farm on the Boston Harbor islands, another off Long Island in New York and a competing proposal for Nantucket Sound. But because the $700-million Cape Wind project came first, and now is about halfway through a rigorous federal permitting process, much of the discussion about offshore wind power is centered here.

“I hate to make it sound like this is going to save the world,” said Deborah Donovan of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Boston, “but it really does set the stage for what is going to happen elsewhere.”

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Taking Sides

The plan to build America’s first offshore wind farm has pitted environmentalists eager to reduce this country’s reliance on power generated by fossil fuels against environmentalists determined to preserve fish, birds and an uncluttered horizon. Yachtsmen argue that a 28-square-mile area filled with 426-foot steel towers would become a navigational nightmare. Local air traffic controllers worry that the windmills would threaten small aircraft. Fishermen fear for the future of scallops, an economic staple and a local delicacy.

The Nantucket Chamber of Commerce and several town councils on Cape Cod oppose the project, which, if approved, could be in operation in three years. But many scientists in the area endorse the effort as a bold step toward curbing global warming. As regulatory roadblocks slowly topple, community meetings ring loud with strong opinions on both sides.

“Partly what you are seeing is the whole not-in-my-backyard thing,” said Wade Greene, who owns guest cottages on Nantucket and also advises philanthropists about environmental projects. “All good, card-carrying environmentalists are for wind power. That just stands to reason. It is so much cleaner. But when it comes down to specific sites, the picture changes.”

Cape Wind President James Gordon dismissed the opponents as “a minority group who have created a lot of fear mongering.”

Gordon will not discuss how large a profit he expects his project to earn. But if defenders of the open seas are concerned about “the marine or aquatic systems or wildlife or birds, they are going down the wrong avenue,” he said. “The greatest threat to marine ecosystems and wildlife is climate change, and we are already seeing that now.”

The wind farm would span an area known as Horseshoe Shoals, six miles from Cape Cod and 13 miles off Nantucket. The water depth ranges from 2 to 20 feet, too shallow to be attractive to commercial fishermen, Gordon said. And the shallow Nantucket Sound waters, unlike the swiftly plummeting California sea floor, make anchoring the wind towers relatively uncomplicated, he noted.

Land-based windmills have become familiar sights in California and around the globe--so much so that wind power is the fastest-growing source of energy worldwide. The first modern offshore wind farm, built 10 years ago off the coast of Denmark, has become a tourist magnet, Gordon said. Eighteen offshore wind parks are under development in Britain alone, “larger than Cape Wind and closer to the shore,” he said.

But continental comparison shopping did not impress John Donelan, associate director of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound and a vocal foe of the Cape Wind proposal.

“This project is unprecedented in its size and its scope,” Donelan said. “Basically, it amounts to a land grab of a public natural resource by private developers who are not really going to give any benefit to the area for the privilege of taking over this unspoiled piece of water.”

Donelan said the Nantucket proposal has national ramifications, underscoring “a crying need for federal legislation to be put in place for siting these projects. We also see the need for a bidding process.”

Though some possible measures have been discussed in Congress, no regulations that specifically govern marine wind farms exist, Donelan said. In his group’s view, the Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees most aquatic construction projects in the United States, “is basically rubber-stamping this project.”

Biologist George M. Woodwell, director of Woods Hole Research Center, which studies climatic disruption, said the region has no choice but to install the windmills.

“I think one has to look at the issue, and the issue is how to get rid of fossil fuels as fast as possible,” he said. “We have an Earth that is warming very rapidly.”

No one knows whether the windmills would affect fish or migratory birds, Woodwell said, but at least one tower would be used to track such data.

An added impetus for exploring alternative power options is that “New England has no indigenous energy resources except for hydropower,” said Donovan, who heads the New England Energy Policy Project for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a coalition that studies social problems. “Everything else that we use, we import.”

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Aesthetic Concerns

But the need for energy independence “unfortunately is juxtaposed against understandable concerns about changing the appearance of the landscape,” Donovan said. “That is what has come to the forefront as a barrier and a source of controversy.”

Aesthetic trepidations prompted the Nantucket Chamber of Commerce, among other local agencies, to weigh in against the Cape Wind proposal. Property owners on both sides of Nantucket Sound have fretted about declining real estate values if their ocean views come to include turbines.

But Gordon, who barnstorms county fairs to promote his project, calls that position “incredibly selfish and absolutely wrong.”

Opponents, said Gordon, “try to give people [the idea] that, if they were in a waterfront hotel and they opened up a window, there would be these 426-foot towers staring at them.” But Horseshoe Shoals is so far from any land mass that, even for such tall structures, “the visual impact would be so modest. They would look like tiny, tiny masts on the horizon--but only on a clear day.”

Nonetheless, change often comes slowly here. As a summer playground for the elite, Nantucket trades on an implicit guarantee of chic predictability. Many Nantucketers welcome the wind farm as an innovative approach to energy. Others resist it simply because it portends change.

“Some people are instinctively against it for that reason alone,” said Greene, the cottage owner and environmental advisor.

Nantucket in particular treasures its heritage, Greene said, marketing an image that is all weathered gray shingles with shiny white trim. A three-story building on Nantucket is a veritable high-rise, Greene said--and yet on a hill stands one of the island’s most treasured historic landmarks: an old wooden windmill.