Jan 23 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Patrick Cassidy Cape Cod Times, Hyannis, Mass.


A new poll released this week found that support for a wind farm in Nantucket Sound drops if customers' electric bills go up by $100 or more per year.

The poll, funded by the anti-Cape Wind group Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, is another in a series of similar surveys that opponents and proponents of the wind farm have touted as proof that the public is on their side.

Conducted by the UMass Dartmouth Center for Policy Analysis, the poll asked 28 questions of 436 National Grid customers across the state over two days earlier this month.

Respondents quickly become sensitive to the price of wind power despite support for the energy source, said the center's director, Clyde Barrow.

 While more than 50 percent of respondents said they would be less likely to support Cape Wind if it meant any increase in their electric bill, roughly the same percentage of respondents said they would be more likely to support the project if it cost them only $50 more a year. The higher the theoretical increase to electric bills because of the Cape Wind project, the less likely respondents said they were to support the project.

Although electric customers on Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard do not buy power from National Grid, Cape Wind is negotiating with the utility company to sell wind power from the project. Nantucket electric users, however, buy their power from the utility.

Cape Wind spokesman Mark Rodgers was critical of the poll, calling it blatantly "bogus," especially considering that it was paid for by a group that receives much of its funding from coal and oil interests. Moreover, he said, information in the poll not only misled respondents, the Alliance may have misled the UMass researchers.

The questions probing the effect of the price of electricity on respondents' support for Cape Wind asked whether an increase in their "monthly electric bill from National Grid by $50 per year" would make them more likely or less likely to support Cape Wind, wording that could confuse respondents who might think the increase was monthly rather than annual, said Michael Elasmer director of the Communication Research Center at Boston University. The survey also asked the same question substituting $100 and $150 for the increased cost.

But this potential confusion did not invalidate the results of another question where the majority of respondents said they would be less likely to support the project if they had to pay any more for their electricity without a figure attached, a finding that makes common sense, Elasmer said.

The $7,000 cost of the survey was paid by the Alliance, but the center developed the questions independently, Barrow said.

The center's assistant director, David Borges, said yesterday that the wording of the questions on the effect of pricing was tested on 20 people, reviewed by the center's staff and did not appear to cause any confusion among respondents.

The alliance discussed a "reasonable range" with UMass staff but the wording of the questions was left to the researchers, said the organization's president and CEO Audra Parker.

"For me the bottom line is that clearly people are unwilling to pay extra for the Cape Wind project," she said.

Another question stated that a federal review of the project "concluded that its cost to produce electricity would be significantly higher than current prices." Although an appendix to the final environmental impact statement on the project released by the federal government last year compared the potential price for electricity for the proposed location on Horseshoe Shoal with the price if it was relocated to other sites, the report did not draw any firm conclusion on the price of power from Cape Wind.

U.S. Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar said earlier this month that he would make a final decision on whether to approve the project by April.

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