Look who’s wealthy and lobbying, Fred, the AWEA.

“The American Wind Energy Association , whose membership includes most of the dominant foreign-owned companies, spent $728,883 in the first half of 2008. In the first half of 2009, it spent $3 million. Its second-quarter 2009 total of $1.83 million was just a few thousand dollars short of energy lobbying king, the American Petroleum Institute ($1.86 million).”

http://investigativereportingworkshop.org/investigations/wind-energy-funds-going-overseas/story/wind-firms-join-lobbying-frenzy/

Mass. Secretary of Energy and the Environment Ian Bowles is back pedaling on the high cost of Cape Wind Energy:

http://bjdurk.newsvine.com/_news/2010/02/19/3923669-secretary-bowles-back-pedals-on-cape-wind-cost-of-energy-

The U.S. Office of Inspector General Cape Wind Report page 28 should prompt your honest retraction of your erroneous statement:

“The clear finding of the FAA is that Cape Wind presents no such hazard.”

The FAA has issued Cape Wind an actual Determination of Presumed Hazard that the OIG defines for your edification:

http://www.doioig.gov/upload/Redacted%20report%20for%20Web.pdf

Do you think all three local airports’ officials and the ferry operators transporting 3 million passengers per year were paid by Cape Wind opposition for their testimony that Cape Wind presents a public safety hazard? I’ve provided their testimony for your review by link above.

You failed to mention Jeffrey Madison’s financial deal with Cape Wind as in hired by. Cape Wind that has no credibility is funding oppositional viewpoint that has no credibilty.

The National Park Service announced the decision by the Keeper of the National Register of Historic Places that Nantucket Sound is eligible for listing to the National Register as:

“The very meaning of “Wampanoag” rendered in English as the phase “People of the First Light or Dawn” refers to their relationship to Nantucket Sound as integral to their homelands, their history, their present, and their future. The evocative phrase “People of the First Light” is like a “tiny imagist poem” (Edward Sapir, quoted in Bragdon 1996: 135) packed with meaning. The word “Wampanoag” is both temporally literal-they have always been/are/will be the first people to see the sunrise over the water-and symbolically referential: they are of the place, it is how they identify themselves and how others know them. The Tribes have referred to their cultural identity and to their religious practices as dependent on their reverential viewsheds of Nantucket Sound…”

http://www.house.gov/delahunt/histcommission.pdf

As you admit, you’ve not had the opportunity to study the Cape Wind proposal in detail. The lead federal regulator, Minerals Management Service, has and admits:

Cape Wind MMS DEIS Appendix F:

“Given the estimated cost of energy is $122/MWh, twice that of the current market and that this is after the full benefit of tax and RPS incentives, the prospects of entering a long-term purchase power contract would seem low.” [end]

“Vestas Wind Power is the largest global supplier of wind turbines, with 35,500 installed worldwide and more than 15,000 employees. The Danish company – which was established shortly after the oil shock of the 1970s – is second only to General Electric in the US market,”

Reporter Erin Ailworth asked Vestas chief Ditlev Engel about U.S. wind energy market:

“What about Massachusetts?”

Vestas’ chief Engel responds:

“We’ve got more than 100 wind projects in the works currently, many of them only one or two small turbines. The largest is Cape Wind, a 300-turbine offshore project. I think if you look at wind resources on-shore in the US, they are fantastic. And, therefore, I am really wondering why anybody wants to put them up offshore because it’s twice the price. So just as an outsider, I am just scratching my head saying, “Why?”

http://www.wind-watch.org/news/2008/09/21/the-answers-to-him-are-blowing-in-the-wind-vestas-chief-sees-untapped-energy-source-in-us/

The only reason industrial wind energy exists is due to tax sheltering opportunities and public subsidies.

As Rep. Pete Stark of CA once remarked:

“These are not wind farms, they’re tax farms.”

Hopefully the letter from attorney and Wampanoag tribal member Jeffrey Madison and eight other tribe members to Secretary Salazar, that was reported on in the Boston Globe, will put an end to the latest charade being used to delay the development of Cape Wind. http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/02/19/wampanoag_tribe_member_challenges_sun_rite_that_could_derail_wind_farm/.

In it he makes very clear that despite his father and grandfather being as tribal medicine men, he never experienced or heard of any sacred tribal ceremony that Cape Wind would impact. He suggests in his letter that “The notion that locating wind turbines in Nantucket Sound will impose on, impact or harm any cultural tradition is just plain false. I believe it to be a fabrication, invented by a small number of Tribal members.”

Barbara,

Regarding you assertions from experts regarding air navigation – you can find experts to testify on all sorts of things, especially when they are being paid by wealthy lobbying firms to make the desired testimony. The purpose of the FAA participation in the NEPA process is to sort out the truth from all the varied opinions. The clear finding of the FAA is that Cape Wind presents no such hazard. Rehashing such stale arguments here serves no purpose. That decision is finished. Time to move on.

Regarding the highly opinionated views of the resources you quote on the subsidies for energy solutions: as soon as they all come out in opposition to the recently announced subsidies for nuclear power, an industry which has received hundreds of billions of dollars in direct and hidden subsides more than wind power, I might consider their opinions something other than blatant hypocrisy.

There is good reason that wind is the fastest growing energy resource in the world for the last decade. It is cost effective, reliable and despite consternation to the contrary, has proven very compatible with the existing electrical grid.

As for your notion that wind will not impact our imports of foreign oil: energy tends to be relatively fungible commodity, especially over time. Heat pumps, electric vehicles, hydrogen generation from hydrolysis and many other solutions will directly substitute renewable generated electricity for oil consumption in buildings, industry and transportation. Changes in the price of energy resources will accelerate technological progress as renewable electricity becomes less expensive than more heavily subsidized incumbent industries like oil, coal and nuclear power.

It is time to look forward. Its time to build Cape Wind.

Fred

The most important public policy consideration is public safety that Cape Wind threatens.

Cape Wind is an FAA Presumed Hazard due to WTG vertical height and radar interference determined to be caused by wind turbines.

Please refer to the experts’ testimony:

http://bjdurk.newsvine.com/_news/2009/09/19/3290406-cape-wind-a-public-safety-hazard-proposed-for-nantucket-sound-

“…A correlated and persistent myth is that increasing wind- and solar-generated electricity will reduce our dependence on foreign oil and thus boost our energy security. Less than 1% of our electricity is generated using petroleum, so any renewable generation will have no appreciable effect on petroleum demand.”

http://www.masterresource.org/2010/02/energy-myths/#more-7200

Expert analyses with 77 cogent comments, by the wind industry informed, for your purview:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/wind_energys_ghosts_1.html

Tax breaks and public subsidies are primary drivers of the wind industry. Without them, wind energy would not exist.

Renewable Energy World

“The nation needs an ambitious plan to promote the deployment of wind and other renewable energy technologies — and the urgent first step it must take is to rapidly extend the expiring renewable energy credits, which are the primary incentive that the nation provides for these technologies today.”

– Randall Swisher, Executive Director, AWEA

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2008/08/us-leads-in-wind-power-production-but-policy-uncertainty-weighs-on-industry-53325

‘The Wind Industry Tells the Truth’

http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/wind-energy-industry-tells-the-truth/

I love your suggestion that we “build as many of these big turbines as possible, and give oil-sponsored terrorists the proverbial “bird,” but let’s NOT turn this into a big pork giveaway to big business while shifting all the burdens (and none of the benefits) to the taxpayer.”

The sad reality is that all energy systems receive very heavy subsidies – through the tax system, through direct subsidies, and through hidden subsidies like our military engagements to protect access to oil or the Price Anderson Act that saddles tax payers with the incredibly huge liabilities of nuclear power.

Another very important reality is that experiments with socialist control of business enterprise have not had a very good long term record throughout history. And the trillions of dollars of debt and deficit spending our state, local and federal governments are running don’t suggest that they would be the ideal managers of our energy systems.

Wind energy subsidies are no more than most energy industries receive and far less than those provided to nuclear power.

And unlike every traditional electrical generation resource, the so called “burdens” of wind power are really negligible and insignificant.

Look at the the pollution from coal. Look at the terrorist targets, carcinogenic byproducts, long lived incredibly dangerous waste products, fissile materials for nuclear weapons proliferation and potentially cataclysmic accidents of nuclear power. Look at the military expenditures and wars we engage in to protect our oil supply. How can these be in any way considered comparable to the inconvenience a few folks suffer from barely being able to see a few wind turbines a couple degrees above the horizon that they aren’t used to seeing yet. In the end it is really aesthetic and subjective considerations that are the only actual “burdens” that anyone is being subjected to with Cape Wind.

Despite Barbara’s claims, every one of the technical issues she raises has been thoroughly reviewed and resolved in the nine year long NEPA process that Cape Wind has undergone and has proven to be issues of little or no significant concern.

Like you imply, I would prefer to see the government completely out of the business of subsidizing business of all kinds. I’d also like to see the government put real price signals on the costs of real burdens on our society, like pricing pollution through a carbon tax, so that the market can more fairly price the real cost of our energy choices.

In the near term, it appears our country is unfortunately headed in the opposite direction toward more government micromanagement of industry of all kinds.

When we do begin to realize the folly of manipulating energy markets as much as we do, hopefully we will be smart enough to start by ending the huge subsidies to Exxon Mobil, to the giant coal companies and to the purveyors of dangerous nuclear technologies that have been going on for half a century or more, before we begin singling out clean renewable energy developers for special punishment. Ideally we will be fair enough to level the playing field by accounting for the unfair long term advantages in the market place that all those subsidies have provided for traditional energy systems.

Let’s all look forward to the day that we can end our dependence on dangerous, expensive, polluting energy resources and as you suggest build as many big wind turbines as possible. If we are serious about a sustainable energy future, after nine years of very thorough regulatory review, the best way to move forward is to build Cape Wind.

Fred