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-