Huffington Magazine Issue 39 | Page 40

SINKING IN BUREAUCRACY to our other energy choices,” said Gordon, who estimates that he has spent at least $65 million working through the regulatory hurdles and fighting lawsuits. “I think that within a certain time frame, maybe having a one-stop agency where the cooperating agencies kind of put in their concern, and the public goes before it and — we should absolutely have public hearings. We have had an extraordinary amount of public hearings on this project. And written comments. That shouldn’t stop. All I’m saying is that there needs to be a reasonable time frame for an up or down decision. Twelve years and counting, Gordon added, is simply too long for any project to sit on the drawing board while regulators and onthe-ground stakeholders squabble over details. “Most projects and most developers that would get involved in a process like that would probably throw up their arms and walk away,” he said. “And for some worthy projects, that would be a shame.” KICKSTARTING AN INDUSTRY On a blustery, early winter day, with a cold, driving rain pelting the windshield, Cape Wind’s long- HUFFINGTON 03.10.13 time spokesman, Mark Rodgers, eases his car into an empty parking lot at Cape Cod’s Craigville Beach in Centerville, Mass. The hamlet is about three miles southwest of Hyannis and located midway along the tricep of the cape, a long, narrow peninsula that stretches out into the Atlantic and then curls up and back, like the flexed arm of a swaggering bodybuilder. Rodgers takes a spot facing due south, into the great emptiness of Nantucket Sound. “We knew from the beginning we had to pass two critical tests,” Rodgers said. “We had to permit the project, and we had to finance the project. And when you’re financing a project, novelty is bad. And we knew, by being America’s first offshore wind farm, that we were going to be novel. So we wanted to make everything we could about the details of the project to be as un-novel as possible. We wanted the most optimal engineering site characteristics we could find.” The project’s corporate developer, Jim Gordon’s Energy Management Inc., which had been building natural gas power plants for nearly 20 years prior to taking interest in an offshore wind project, found in Nantucket Sound what it considered to be the most advantageous offshore spot any-