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-