Huffington Magazine Issue 39 | Page 42

SINKING IN BUREAUCRACY summertime vacationers. The 130 turbines, each standing 258 feet tall from water to hub and with anywhere from six to nine football fields of open water between them, would be as close to Craigville Beach as nearly anywhere, and their massive fiberglass blades would reach 440 feet above sea level — well higher than the tip of the Statue of Liberty’s torch — at their highest rotation. On a clear day, they would be unmistakably visible from this parking lot: A row of thin hash marks along the horizon, according to photographic simulations produced by Cape Wind. Collectively, the spinning turbines would have a nominal capacity of 468 megawatts, but this is an idealized energy-industry metric representing the site’s output if the winds blew strong and steady at all times, and all turbines were spinning continually at maximum capacity. In the real world, of course, that never happens, and the average power output would likely be somewhere between 30 percent and 40 percent of that maximum capacity. Critics hew to the lower end of the range, supporters the higher, but Cape Wind estimates that the av- HUFFINGTON 03.10.13 erage output of the facility would represent about 75 percent of the typical electricity demand for the Cape and its nearby islands. That may seem small, but backers have argued that a rapid expansion of offshore wind farms along the nation’s coasts could provide, in aggregate, a substantial and reliable power resource. And from Cape Wind’s earliest days, advocates noted that clean-energy development in the U.S. was already lagging woefully behind other parts of the world, principally Europe, which had already spent a decade developing offshore wind power by the time Cape Wind was first proposed. Today, there are more than 1,600 offshore wind turbines at 55 different facilities and representing more than 3,800 megawatts of capacity connected to the European grid, according to the European Wind Energy Association. Several that would dwarf Cape Wind in size and output are already being planned. China, a gluttonous consumer of coal-fired electricity, nonetheless has at least one commercial-scale offshore wind farm of its own, and several more are in the works. There are still no offshore wind farms in the United States. To supporters of renewable energy, this is inexplicable, particularly given the imperatives of cli-