Yesterday the Minerals Management Service (MMS) released its final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on the proposed Cape Wind offshore wind power development in Massachusetts, concluding that the project will have no significant negative environmental consequences. Release of the final EIS clears the way for the MMS to lease a portion of Nantucket Sound to Cape Wind, but it hardly makes the project a done deal. Cape Wind will still need to obtain additional permits and clear additional reviews from the Federal Aviation Administration and U.S. Coast Guard. Project opponents also promised litigation and other efforts to prevent the erection of wind turbines in the Sound. Senator Kennedy, for one, voiced his continued opposition and predicted any lease to Cape Wind would be overturned.
The Cape Wind experience illustrates how existing regulatory regimes are not particularly welcoming to alternative energy development. MMS offshore lease regulations, for instance, were designed for offshore oil and gas development, not windfarms. Cape Wind has had to face numerous regulatory reviews and overlapping requirements at various levels of government. If wind power and other alternative energy sources are to ever make a significant and cost-justified contribution to the nation's energy supply, the regulatory thicket will need to be cleared. The Bush Administration showed little interest in such an undertaking, despite its stated commitment to less onerous regulation and technological innovation. Perhaps the Obama Administration will recognize the need for innovation-enhancing regulatory reforms.
I first read the headline as a reference to a racehorse named "Cape Wind."
Duh.
Other wind sites, such as the local Hull site, get permitted much more easily. But Hull put their wind mill on top of the town dump.
are not particularly welcoming to alternative energy development.are reflections of current politcal views show that NIMBY works for the rich famous and politically connected.The fact that when completed they generate only a trivial amount of electricity reduces my lack of concern even further.
Ha, ha. You had me there for a moment.
Mind you, I think some obstacles need to be removed - like old laws that required automobiles to be preceded by a person on foot with a red lantern.
There's a new wind farm being constructed in western Iowa along I80. Of course, due to FAA regulation each one is topped with a blinking red light. (you can consider "blinking" an epithet if you wish) I don't know if it's more irritating that they are there, or that the hundred or so lights are blinking in unison.
cost down from 40 cents/KWH in 1979 . 2006
October 2007 on cost of wind .
energy subsidies.
The legal red tape created by environmental laws and lawsuits by NIMBY's will make any "infrastructure stimulus" program fail. By the time anything is approved, the need for the stimulus will be gone.
I am just waiting for a Native American tribe to find religious grounds for stopping this project. They do that here in Arizona all the time.
In Lawrence, KS, they killed an important road project because it went too close to a "prayer circle." Never you mind that this prayer circle was put their by students at Haskell Indian Institute, and was not on Native American land.
One way or another, modern forces will put sand in the gears of any sort of large scale project - unless it is something green an useless, like the Phoenix Light Rail system.
but who has time to proofread, and the spelling checker liked it just fine :-(
Prof. Adler, I'd be interested to see your take on the legal and regulatory difficulties to be overcome for any form of carbon sequestration to be possible - that is assuming that some approaches can be proved to be feasible and economical.
The existing regulatory regime isn't bad: Environmental Impact Statements are designed to reveal and identify the environmental impact of federal, or federally regulated, projects.
The problem is that environmental (which includes hard, chemical and physical, as well as soft, 'cultural,' 'viewshed', and social) impacts are not well understood. Environmental science is not physics.
Which means that, in the absence of hard science, judgement calls intrude (inevitably). And where there is judgement, there is ambiguity-and thus, politics.
The existing regulatory regime is not especially hostile to alternative energy. It is simply potentially hostile to any project that is politically controversial.
Thus, Jonathan may really be arguing that all projects are burdened by regulation. Or, he may be arguing that alternative energy projects, because they are special, should get a special regulatory pass to avoid the normal regulatory burden (though he should make an argument for this). Its not clear which he believes.
sk
Nonsense. The Cape Wind project shows how one greedy and crooked politician (Senator Kennedy) can hold an important energy producing project hostage. The regulatory agencies - which are hip-deep in environmentalist sociopaths - are merely a reflection of a larger political problem.
No amount of regulation "reform" will cure arrogance and stupidity.
If the propensity of the dems to insulate 'stimulus' projects from NEPA is any indication, what you'll get is environmental exemptions for 'renewable' energy -- more subsidy.
I haven't seen any proof whatsoever that Cape Wind is a worthwhile endeavor except for exposing NIMBY hypocrites for what they are.
Speaking of which, that appelation goes both ways with Dick Cheney reportedly having been behind the addition of the withdrawal of a significant chunk of Wyoming from Oil and Gas development to a bloated omnibus of horrible ideas that also included the same southcoast Massachusetts cabal trying to put a dagger through the heart of a LNG terminal near the Massachusetts/RI border by declaring an industrial riverway to be "wild and scenic". Now we're not talking just hypocrisy, we're talking inanity (add the 's' if you prefer).
Brian
Small dams are essentially no longer allowed. Connecticut used to have thousands that produced power.
Just to name a couple I've witnessed myself.
Cui Bono? And it ain't you, sucker.
We watched the old Soviet Union get strangled by its own bureaucrats and petty politicians and learned nothing.
The real problem is that are no private property rights for Nantucket Sound. If you would privatize Nantucket Sound pleasure boaters or alternative energy producers could purchase it -- based on their willingness and ability to pay. How can you efficiently allocate resources absent private propery rights? The government is a lousy steward of public land and waterways.
As Prof Block would say we need the equivalent of barbered wire to "fence in" bodies of water:
"Suppose, that is, that property rights in bodies of water were recognized by law. It takes no great
leap of imagination to suppose that scientists and engineers would soon be able to offer new
technology which could distinguish between 'mine and thine.'"
Disclaimer: I do own waterfront property on the Cape, and I don't like people cavalierly dismissing my arguments as NIMBY or hypocrisy. Is this a class issue? Why such hostility to the rich? Why the animosity to people who have succeeded in our capitalist economy?? I would expect this type of argument from the left, not the right...
Most public works projects work this way. Look at NYC water supply, TVA, Grand Cooley Dam, Military bases, etc. etc.
It should be easier in areas that are already public property. It simply requires the waiving of the adversarial system of land management we have come to love.
And time will pass.
And grass will grow from your cheeks Akiba, and still the wind farm will not have been built.
You can't be too thin, to rich, or too cynical.
One of these facts is that Cape Cod has some of the most expensive electricity in the continental US. There is a single oil-burning plant in Sandwich that powers the local grid. That plant emits noisy, nasty, crunchy volts that love to fry sensitive equipment. It has brownouts in the summer and outages in the winter.
That oil-burning plant also gives the area some of the worst air pollution in the Northeast, with levels of ozone that have been rated by the American Lung Association as actively harmful to health. The lack of reliable electricity also means that many houses depend on wood-burning stoves for winter heat, which also contribute to pollution.
Cape Cod desperately needs additional, independent power generating capacity. It also desperately needs power that is less hazardous to the residents' health. Wind power promises both of these.
Another fact is not technical but political. The population of Cape Cod is divided between residents, who live there year-round, and "summer people" who don't. Summer people bring a lot of money to the Cape -- but unlike tourists in most tourist economies, many summer people also have their legal residence on-Cape and can vote there, even though they spend most of the year in Boston or elsewhere.
Summer people, by and large, want to keep Cape Cod rustic, which is to say, primitive. This is directly contrary to the interests of full-time residents, who want things like reliable electricity and breathable air.
I'd love to see a nuclear power plant on Cape Cod. Or anything else that would offer an independent and non-polluting source of electricity. And so would a lot of the Cape's scientific community. A nuke plant would certainly be more reliable than wind power, too.
But a nuke plant is unlikely to happen for a number of reasons, chiefly that the U.S. isn't building nuke plants at all.
If you have a comment about spelling, typos, or format errors, please e-mail the poster directly rather than posting a comment.
Comment Policy: We reserve the right to edit or delete comments, and in extreme cases to ban commenters, at our discretion. Comments must be relevant and civil (and, especially, free of name-calling). We think of comment threads like dinner parties at our homes. If you make the party unpleasant for us or for others, we'd rather you went elsewhere. We're happy to see a wide range of viewpoints, but we want all of them to be expressed as politely as possible.
We realize that such a comment policy can never be evenly enforced, because we can't possibly monitor every comment equally well. Hundreds of comments are posted every day here, and we don't read them all. Those we read, we read with different degrees of attention, and in different moods. We try to be fair, but we make no promises.
And remember, it's a big Internet. If you think we were mistaken in removing your post (or, in extreme cases, in removing you) -- or if you prefer a more free-for-all approach -- there are surely plenty of ways you can still get your views out.