The wind farm proposed for Nantucket Sound is designed to use technology that will be obsolete before the project is built. The project represents a knee-jerk reaction to real long-term energy needs, and opportunism intended to appeal to the casually fashionable environmentalist.

The project is modeled on the failed megagrid system of the past, in which the drop across the system is measurable against the remnant of product delivered.

What is being put forward, ostensibly on behalf of the consumers of other parts of the country, is the export of their energy problem to the Cape and Islands region. This is done with the expectation that the settled residents actually are willing to undergo the expropriation of habitat and quality of life for the foreseeable future.

The taxpayers are being told that they will be paying, to subsidize this project until its termination, $1.3 billion, an amount exceeding:

• The promoters’ outlay for the project itself;

• The annual cost of health services in the state of Massachusetts;

• All research and development for viable technologies in the region;

• 250 times the entire annual budget of Dukes County.

The cost overruns actually planned have not been revealed. Payment for remediation to the environment during hazardous construction has not been offered by the developers. The eventual teardown of the project in 10 years will exceed the cost of installation, coinciding with the exhaustion of taxpayer-funded subsidies. This too is not provided for in the developers’ plan and will be cast upon the taxpayers.

Energy solutions for stable and integral regions such as the Cape and Islands can and should be local, nonintrusive, upgradable and designed for change.

Most of all, the successful and sustainable model for energy systems appropriately links cost of production to beneficiaries of the product.

The Cape and Islands should not be called upon to pay for the cost and damages of development in regions unable to meet the needs they create.

The project’s already out of date technology is being dumped on the taxpayers and residents of Massachusetts and Dukes County under increasingly desperate conditions.

The project would not be conceived, or conceivable without the cost burden being thrust upon the taxpayers and the issuance of yet more junk paper.

The plea will be made that sacrifice is necessary to save the environment.

Cape Wind believes it has found those to willingly bear the brunt. Several bureaucrats, would-be political pioneers and compliant “in the mode” regulators in far away places are trying to pave the way.

The promoters and supporters of the Cape Wind project are about to perform the equivalent of loading 34,000 General Motors 2005 Hummers into Nantucket Sound. Brand new.

This project is not saving the earth. It is rending asunder the fiscal and social fabrics it purports to serve.

The residents, taxpayers and public watchdogs are encouraged to follow the money: already distributed, banked by the promoters and promised to hopeful beneficiaries in every sector.

 

Timothy Holmes owns Energy Solutions in New York, Europe and Dubai. He has long family ties on the Vineyard.