A few things became quite clear at Wednesday night’s public hearing on the draft environmental impact statement on the Cape Wind project.
The first was that about twice as many Vineyarders, assuming those who attended are broadly representative of Island opinion, oppose the project as support it.
America’s first major offshore wind power generation project, Cape Wind, has cleared a key hurdle after a comprehensive federal environmental study found it would have no lasting major adverse impacts on wildlife, navigation, fishing, tourism or recreation.
The draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) by the Minerals Management Service, running to almost 2,000 pages, will now be subject to a process of community consultation, but if no major new concerns surface, federal approval of the $1 billion project appears likely by around the end of the year.
Some 61 per cent of residents of Cape Cod and the Islands favor the Cape Wind project, according to a major new scientific survey of 501 residents.
So said the press release put out yesterday by the Civil Society Institute, which describes itself as a nonprofit and nonpartisan think tank in Newton. The release made it look like a decisive verdict in favor of the wind power project, delivered in the court of public opinion.
A forum bringing together those for and against the controversial Cape Wind electricity project drew more than 120 people to the Katharine Cornell Theatre on Thursday night and generated far more light than heat.
The forum, organized under the auspices of the Vineyard Haven library lecture and workshop series, was intended to establish a factual basis for further discussion of the project rather than encourage debate, and by that measure can be counted a signal success.
A staff report released by the Cape Cod Commission this week gives a decidedly mixed review to the controversial plan by Cape Wind Associates to build 130 wind turbines on Horseshoe Shoal. The report finds that Cape Wind’s plan to connect the turbines to land in West Yarmouth through underwater electricity transmission lines meets only eight of 32 performance standards set by the commission.
In general, the staff report concluded, a good deal more information is needed in order to satisfy the requirements of the commission.
Setting up another potential roadblock for the offshore wind farm proposed in Nantucket Sound, the town of Barnstable and two groups of Cape Cod citizens last week filed notices of intent to sue the state’s top environmental official for his endorsement of the project.
The three separate notices serve as formal appeals of the certificate signed last month by Massachusetts Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Ian Bowles, who found that developers of the Cape Wind project had fulfilled their environmental review requirements on the state level.
