Pay the Price

This week, as estimates of the cost of cleaning up the massive oil slick off the Gulf Coast stretched above ten billion dollars, with no clear way to stanch the pollution now visible from space, irreparably harming marine life and devastating the regional economy there, Cape Wind announced a deal to sell half the power generated from its planned turbines in Nantucket Sound to the energy delivery company National Grid. The cost of our monthly electricity bills would increase by less than two dollars.

The deal puts the cost to customers at less than twenty-one cents per kilowatt hour — about double the present retail rate. Our neighbor state, Rhode Island, knocked back a deal proposed by its own offshore wind project’s developers in March because of its similar price increase. Massachusetts regulators have yet to rule on the Cape Wind utility deal.

Yet opponents already are calling the deal outrageously expensive. The Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound was yesterday reported to be considering a legal challenge to the state law, the Green Communities Act, which requires investor-owned utilities here (such as National Grid) to enter into long-term contracts to buy at least three per cent of their electricity supply from renewable generators in the state. This protest seems at odds with the Alliance’s other objections, which include safeguarding endangered species and marine life.

Cape Wind is an imperfect project, heavily subsidized and not without risk to our waters and way of life. But president Jim Gordon was right when he noted, about the oil fiasco in the Gulf, “It gives the nation pause to reflect on, really, what are our energy choices, and how are we going to live with them? . . . Every energy project has some impact. This was never about a choice between Cape Wind or nothing.”

During the nine years this community debated the Cape Wind project, the number of new offshore drilling permits tripled. The costs of that are being mopped up with human hair and pantyhose, some donated and shipped even from the Vineyard to Louisiana right now.

Meanwhile this week in Washington, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry introduced legislation that seeks to reduce carbon pollution by seventeen per cent ten years from now, and by more than eighty per cent in forty years. It puts a small price on carbon emissions, a move which would very likely make the proposed cost increase from buying Cape Wind’s renewable energy seem more competitive. Whatever the problems of the nation’s first offshore wind farm in our backyard may be, five cents a day on our power bills is not one of them.