COURTESY OF CAPE WIND ASSOCIATES
SINKING IN
BUREAUCRACY
Dam that tamed the mighty Colorado River was finished in 1936
after a mere five years. Yet 130 offshore wind turbines, a pioneering
project of President Obama’s ‘new
energy economy,’ may take three
times as long to complete.”
Three more years have slipped
by since that editorial was written.
To be sure, Cape Wind was challenged in part by its uniqueness.
The U.S. had no history of permitting offshore wind farms — a task
that fell initially to the Army Corps
of Engineers, which took roughly
three years from the time the proj-
HUFFINGTON
03.10.13
ect was first proposed to prepare a
lengthy Draft Environmental Impact Statement, as required by the
decades-old National Environmental Policy Act. Some 5,000 public
comments were submitted on that
draft, but it would be quickly rendered moot by passage of the Energy Policy Act in 2005, which shifted jurisdiction for offshore wind
permitting from the Army Corps to
the Department of the Interior.
To the dismay of Gordon and
his partners, Interior decided to
pursue its own environmental
review, which would not be published in draft form until three
years later, in early 2008. A final
environmental impact statement
An artist’s
rendering
of the Cape
Wind E