Cape Wind opponents draw environmental and political parallels to Gulf oil disaster

Cape Wind opponents draw environmental and political parallels to Gulf oil disaster

By Gale Courey Toensing

Story Published: Jun 10, 2010

Photo courtesy Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound

This simulation of the Cape Wind wind power factory in Nantucket Sound shows a view of the project from the Centerville bridge.

MARTHA’S VINEYARD, Mass. – As opponents of a massive wind energy factory in Nantucket Sound watch the impact of energy giant BP’s oil blowout on the ocean and delicate ecosystems of the Louisiana coast, they are drawing parallels between the energy projects and warning that another environmental disaster is likely to happen in the waters off Cape Cod.

Opponents say that the Cape Wind project, the first offshore wind energy plant in the country, will destroy marine and avian life of the Sound, as well as cultural and historic treasures, create a hazard to public safety and cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

And despite Interior’s insistence the department abided by every required regulation in reviewing and approving the Cape Wind project, opponents continue to question procedural exceptions and the connections between Cape Wind and members of the Obama administration.

The controversial wind turbine plant proposal was approved by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar April 28, a week after the BP explosion that killed 11 men and began spewing crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

The approval came despite an avalanche of opposition from the Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoag nations, and an array of environmental groups, local, state and federal elected officials, shipping and airport authorities and federal agencies, including the National Register of Historic Places.

Cheryl Andrews-Maltais, chairwoman of the Aquinnah Wampanoag Nation on Martha’s Vineyard, said President Barack Obama’s comments during a May 27 press conference on the BP disaster reflect what the tribe has been saying all along about Cape Wind.

“Cape Wind got a no-bid sweetheart deal on the federal lands and waters of Nantucket Sound that had already been designated as a marine sanctuary and monument decades ago. They got a waiver on the open vetting process and on balancing the need versus the benefit of taking of public lands for private development and profit.”

The Cape Wind proposal includes 130 wind turbine generators towering 440 feet above water level across 24 square miles of the sound; a 66.5-mile buried submarine transmission cable system; an electric service platform with 40,000 gallons of oil; a helicopter landing pad; and two 115-kilovolt lines crossing 25 miles to the mainland power grid.

Nantucket Sound is sacred to the Wampanoag nations – the People of the First Light. The wind energy plant would obscure their view of the rising sun in ceremony and would destroy the ocean bed, which was once dry land where their ancestors lived and died.

Obama’s comments about the government’s responsibility to “reduce threats to our environment” were bitterly ironic to the Wampanoag nations.

“The construction of Cape Wind isn’t a ‘threat’ to our environment, it is an absolute certainty,” Andrews-Maltais said. “It is the total destruction of the only known submerged Paleo-Indian archeological site in existence today.”

Most painful, she said, were Obama’s comments about growing up in Hawaii “where the ocean is sacred. … (and) an integral part of who (the Hawaiians) are.”

“Why is it that the president is recognizing all of this for everyone else except for us? We feel that he is marginalizing or dismissing us as Indians, almost like we don’t have the same reverence, responsibility, culture and right to practice our religious traditions as the Hawaiians or any other federally recognized tribe,” Andrews-Maltais said.

The Federal Aviation Administration approved the project in May, reversing its earlier opinion that the wind factory is a “presumed hazard” to the 400,000 flights that cross the area annually. The approval followed Cape Wind’s agreement to provide between $1 million and $12 million to modernize a nearby radar facility to mitigate the effects of electromagnetic interference from the wind factory’s turbines.

The mitigation is akin to the untested “safety procedures” that failed on the BP oil rig, opponents said.

The measures to upgrade radar systems are “unproven theoretical mitigation,” said the Alliance to Save Nantucket Sound, which has filed two notices of intent to file suit against the Interior Department’s decision in federal district court in Washington.

“This is an entirely political decision that flies in the face of public safety and the recommendations of the pilots who use this airspace every day,” said Audra Parker, the organization’s president and CEO.

Also in May, National Grid announced that its ratepayers would purchase half of Cape Wind’s power at a premium of $442 million over the course of the 15-year agreement. The total cost of the project’s power would add $884 million to Massachusetts residential and commercial ratepayers’ bills.

Cape Wind is also depending on as much as $600 million in stimulus funds to offset the $2 billion-plus cost of constructing the plant, much of which will go to foreign countries, such as China, which manufactures the Siemens turbines that will be used for the Cape Wind project.

The Investigative Reporting Workshop found more than 80 percent of the first $1 billion in stimulus funds to wind energy companies went to foreign firms. The administration has since handed out another $1 billion, bringing the total given out to $2.1 billion with more than 79 percent going to overseas companies.

Barbara Durkin, an environmental activist who has investigated and documented the Cape Wind project for the past seven years, said Cape Wind’s approval was “based on politics, not science.”

“The Gulf disaster is a harbinger of what should be expected in Nantucket Sound by Secretary Salazar’s rubber-stamping of Cape Wind.

“The cozy relationships between MMS (Minerals Management Service) and the oil industry echo cozy relationships between the White House and the wind industry,” Durkin said, naming White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and National Economic Council Director Lawrence H. Summers as having connections to wind energy and private equity companies.

Cape Wind Associates is a joint venture between Energy Management Inc. and Wind Management Inc. of Boston, which is a subsidiary of UPC, a European-based wind energy company that’s been known as First Wind in the U.S. since May 2008.

Former New York Sun managing editor Ira Stoll uncovered some of the political connections on his Web site, Future of Capitalism, reporting last fall that First Wind received $115 million in stimulus funds.

First Wind owners include the D.E. Shaw Group, a private equity, hedge fund and technology investment company, and Madison Dearborn Partners, a private equity firm that specializes in leveraged buyouts.

Summers held a $5.2 million a year job at the D.E. Shaw Group, and Madison Dearborn is the firm of which Emanuel said, “They’ve been not only supporters of mine, they’re friends of mine.”

Emanuel has received more than $98,000 in campaign contributions from Madison Dearborn Partners, according to www.opensecrets.org.

Asked what role, if any, Summers and Emanuel played in the process of approving the Cape Wind project, Salazar spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff said, “They had no role.”

But Emanuel and Summers were recently involved in discussions regarding the $2 billion Shepherds Flat project in Oregon, the Washington Post reported.

The Pentagon threatened to stop the Shepherds Flat project and other planned wind projects in other states, because the giant turbines could interfere with the Air Force’s radar systems. The owners, Caithness Energy, worried a delay would cause a loss of eligibility for federal stimulus funds.

“Pentagon officials have met with aides to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, National Economic Council Director Lawrence H. Summers and White House energy and climate change adviser Carol Browner in an effort to resolve the impasse,” the Post reported in April.

By the end of April, the heavy political fire had worked, and the Pentagon dropped its opposition, according to The Oregonian.