PREVIOUS PAGE: COURTESY OF CAPE WIND ASSOCIATES
SINKING IN
BUREAUCRACY
The advantages of the site
seemed plain: Relentless, harddriving winds, shallow shoals
several miles offshore on which
to anchor large turbines, and, perhaps most importantly, a left-leaning population inclined to support
what was already viewed at the
time as an overdue migration away
from dirtier sources of electricity.
“We have real and looming environmental problems on the horizon,” Gordon told reporters that
summer, as he prepared to apply
for the necessary federal and state
permits. “Is this going to solve
these problems? No. But it is going to help.”
Almost 12 years later, the now
59-year-old Gordon, who graduated from Boston University during
the 1970s oil crises with a degree
in communications and, he says,
vague designs on film school before he set his sights on the energy
business, is still pressing his case.
Not a single turbine is in the water.
Acquiring the full array of government permits and sign-offs
— a byzantine process involving
dozens of sometimes overlapping,
often contradictory agencies, hundreds of officials and thousands of
pages of impact statements — took
over a decade. And more than a
HUFFINGTON
03.10.13
“I CAN’T THINK OF ANYTHING MORE
BENIGN IN TERMS OF IMPACT
THAN AN OFFSHORE WIND FARM.”
dozen lawsuits, citing everything
from potential disruption of whale
and bird migrations to interference with airplane and shipping
traffic, the wrecking of commercial
fishing grounds and the desecration of sacred Native American
sites, have thrown sand in the
project’s gears at every turn.
Virtually all of the opposition
suits over the years have been
rejected ultimately by the courts,
but at least four more are still
pending, and opponents promise
to keep fighting.
To be sure, as the first proposed offshore wind project in the
United States, Cape Wind, as it
is called, was bound to encounter
unique scrutiny, and like any undertaking of its size, it is not without environmental impacts. But
the long-thwarted wind farm also
highlights what some critics say
has become a bloated and overly
complicated regulatory maze
through which fewer and fewer
project developers of any kind
have the wherewithal to navigate.
Indeed, while it has earned the