Stormy seas ahead for Ken Salazar?
It’s down to Ken Salazar now.
The Interior Department’s Advisory Council on Historic Preservation report, released Friday, claims that the impact of the $1 billion, 130-wind-turbine Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound will be “pervasive, destructive and… permanent”. The report read as though it was written by Cape Wind’s most prominent opponent, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound.
Now Interior Secretary Salazar, who is expected to make a decision on the Massachusetts wind farm later this month, is left with two equally unappetizing choices.
The first option is for Salazar to make sympathetic noises about the importance of The Kennedy Compound in Hyannis, which is prominently mentioned in the advisory report, and talk about his respect for the Wampanoag tribes, whose sacred rights will be trampled by Cape Wind.
And then he can approve the project, which will put wind turbines in a 24-square-mile area roughly five miles offshore.
No project, he could argue, is going to be free of conflict and there is a case to be made that the objections to Cape Wind amount to cultural and historic preservation run amok.
The advisory report, for example, raises “the potential for undiscovered submerged archaelogical sites” on the proposed site of the wind farm, Horseshoe Shoal.
Who, exactly, was angling to dig in these underwater archaeological sites prior to Cape Wind’s proposal, one might ask?
More to the point, a broad push for the greening of the country’s electrical supply has to begin somewhere.
Cape Wind will bring 420 megawatts of clean energy to New England consumers and is a showpiece project for an administration that is eager to show the viability of renewable energy. The developer claims that it will “launch a whole new industry… of clean offshore renewable energy development”.
Or will it?
The project, viable or not, has turned into a public relations boondoggle for offshore wind that could set the industry’s public image back years.
So begins the argument for why Salazar should send Cape Wind back to the drawing board.
The federal government, unsure of how to handle such a project when it was first proposed about a decade ago, made up the permitting rules as it went along.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proved itself to be incapable of looking at claims about the cultural importance of Horseshoe Shoal.
Later efforts by the Interior Department to consult with the Indian tribes were, the adviory report found, “tentative, inconsistent and late.”
The Interior Department does not need the centerpiece project of the new green energy era to spring from retrograde trampling of Indian claims and rights.
Green energy has enough problems with affordability and immature technology that it can ill afford disputes over project developers and the government running roughshod over critics.
It would be nice if there was a middle ground between these two positions.
Audra Parker, head of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound suggested to G.E.R. that a site called South of Tuckernuck Island, would be a good alternative to Horseshoe Shoal.
In truth, that would be a loss for Cape Wind and the company would in all likelihood scrap the plan rather than build there.
So again: it’s down to Salazar.
Photo: Courtesy Cape Wind