Cape Wind - The Book

Blue H's Ticket to the Front of the Line

Imagine if this commitment had been shown Cape Wind.

 

Exxon and off-shore energy

From Today's Providence Journal:

Wendy Williams: New offshore-energy rules friendly to Exxon, et al.

01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, July 17, 2008

WENDY WILLIAMS

MASHPEE

AT LONG LAST, the federal agency appointed in 2005 by Congress to oversee the development of offshore wind-, tidal- and wave-energy projects has released its proposed regulations for how that should occur.

Energy entrepreneurs who wish to participate in the fledgling industry are far from happy.

A few suggest that the regulations may have been designed to favor larger corporations, essentially cutting out the smaller, less-well-funded companies — those that do not have well-funded lobbyists in Washington. The offshore fossil-fuel industry has frequently expressed interest in entering the new market. Owners of offshore drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico have been looking for ways to turn those structures into energy-producing entities. This would let them both produce new forms of energy and eliminate the expense of decommissioning the platforms once drilling is complete.

“Perhaps friends of Dick Cheney helped to write this rule,” quipped one small-scale entrepreneur who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution from the Minerals Management Service, the agency charged with overseeing offshore-energy development..

The MMS’s lengthy and complex proposed rules are clearly not designed to encourage new companies.

“They’re not dealing with Exxon here,” said Chris Sauer, of Ocean Renewable Energy, based in Fall River. “We’re just a small start-up.” ORE currently has innovative tidal-energy technology at a test site off the coast of Eastport, Maine. Ultimately, the company hopes to generate 100 to 200 megawatts of power for use in Maine’s electric grid. Sauer’s project is in near-shore waters, so that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has oversight responsibilities, rather than MMS.

The 450-page document is far from user-friendly.

It will make absorbing summer reading for the several hundred companies hoping to build innovative offshore wind, wave or tidal projects in U.S. waters, said Tom Jensen, a lawyer with the law firm of Sonnenschein, Nath and Rosenthal, based in Washington, D.C. Jensen helps wave and tidal start-up companies navigate the federal permitting process.

“I think most of us had been hoping for something simple and relatively accommodating to a new industry interested in pilot and demonstration projects,” Jensen wrote in an e-mail. “On the surface at least, a set of new rules as thick as a phonebook sends a strong signal that the infant renewable-energy industry should expect a very heavy regulatory hand from the Interior Department.”

Anyone who has followed the Cape Wind case will not find his reaction surprising.

Indeed, some people suggest that the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, the fossil-fuel-funded group opposing Cape Wind, may have had a hand in some of the regulation-writing. The Alliance’s cadre of well-paid lawyers is likely to file hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of comments regarding the new rules, even as Cape Wind, having been grandfathered in, is undergoing a separate review process.

The federal agency’s proposed rules now enter a public-comment period. MMS has said it would move quickly to release the permanent regulations before the change of presidential administrations. Given the agency’s foot-dragging to date, however, that forecast is difficult to believe.

The document does, however, put to rest at least one relentless complaint from Cape Wind foes — that Cape Wind and other offshore wind projects would get a free ride from the federal government.

The MMS calls for a payment of 2 percent of a company’s revenues from any given offshore site. By contrast, land-based wind projects pay a lease fee based on the amount of land used, rather than on revenues.

The agency also calls for a series of auctions for a particular site that proceed according to the level of the site’s use. A site will be opened for a bid for exploration of its feasibility, and, later, another bid will occur for the final construction of a project. This means that a company could spend a lot of money finding out whether a particular site is appropriate for wind, wave or tidal development, but, after gathering the data, not have enough money to succeed in the final bid to allow for project development. “Some large company with more money like Exxon could step in and take the site over,” Sauer said.

Exactly how the document will affect the Cape Wind project remains unclear at this point. “We are still in the process of reviewing this document, and we applaud MMS for their careful and thorough work,” the company said.

Cape Wind is undergoing a separate review process. A series of public hearings, quite similar to those held by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in December 2004, was held by MMS in March 2008. The agency’s final decision may come this fall. But then again, it may not.

Finally, the Rules Are Out

RENEWABLE ENERGY: MMS floats rule proposal for offshore projects
(07/08/2008)

Ben Geman, Greenwire senior reporter


The Interior Department is unveiling proposed rules
<http://www.eenews.net/features/documents/2008/07/08/document_gw_01.pdf>
today to govern wind, wave and other alternative energy projects in federal coastal waters.

Interior's Minerals Management Service will propose regulations in a Federal Register notice tomorrow that describes the leasing process that it intends to implement. In addition, the rules will govern "alternate" uses of oil and natural gas platforms, such as fish farming and research.

Offshore renewable energy is in its infancy in the United States, and major energy legislation enacted in 2005 put MMS in charge of governing the fledgling sector on the federal outer continental shelf (OCS). MMS already oversees oil and gas leasing in federal waters.

The proposal notes that the 2005 energy law that handed MMS jurisdiction was needed because the lack of clear federal rules and roles is a major problem.

"This lack of clearly outlined authority was a significant impediment to the development of renewable energy on the OCS, and dampened efforts by potential energy developers and federal regulators to seriously develop and consider offshore projects," the proposal says.

The proposal envisions two types of leases. The first would be five-year limited leases that provide access rights for site assessments and technology testing, followed by longer-term -- perhaps 25-year -- leases for producing, selling and delivering power on a commercial scale. The lease sizes would be determined on a case-by-case basis.

To date, most ocean hydropower projects -- using waves, currents or tides -- have been proposed in state waters, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Cape Wind, other OCS projects

But developers are looking to the outer continental shelf for wind and ocean energy, most notably Cape Wind's proposal to build a 130-turbine project in federal waters off of Cape Cod, Mass., that could generate up to 420 megawatts of power. That project's federal review is proceeding in parallel with the MMS rule development, because it was initiated years before the 2005 energy law.

MMS issued a largely favorable draft environmental impact statement for the project in January, but the project faces fierce local opposition.

Another company, Bluewater Wind LLC, is planning a project in federal
waters off the Delaware coast and recently entered into a long-term
contract to sell its power, but the project is awaiting completion of the federal rulemaking process ClimateWire <http://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2008/06/24/archive/7> , June 24).

While the industry is young, experts see large potential for projects in federal waters and closer to shore. According to the Electric Power Research Institute, harnessing a fifth of the coastal wave energy at 50 percent efficiency would be comparable to the electricity produced by all of the nation's hydropower dams.

Jason Bak, chief executive of wave-energy developer Finavera Renewables, told a Senate committee last year that resolving questions of federal regulation is vital to developing OCS projects.

"No sensible developer will consider placing a wave, tidal or current energy project on the OCS," Bak said. "We will stay away from the OCS as long as the regulatory authority is unclear, contradictory or unduly burdensome." FERC late last year granted the company the first FERC wave energy license for its Makah Bay Offshore Wave Energy Pilot Project off Washington state's coast.

The new MMS proposal says offshore renewable energy is an evolving industry, with wind, wave and current projects expected in the nearer term, and ffshore solar and hydrogen a possibility in the future.

"These regulations were developed to allow for a broad spectrum of alternative energy development, without specific requirements for each type of energy production," the proposal states, adding that as MMS gains experience with offshore renewable energy, the rules may be updated to include "energy resource-specific provisions."

Click here
<http://www.eenews.net/features/documents/2008/07/08/document_gw_01.pdf>
to read the proposed rules.



 

SRO At Chatham Book Talk

Many thanks to the staff at Where The Sidewalk Ends for a great book talk tonight. We were amazed at the number of people ( Standing Room Only) on a weekend night!

This Just In From The Independent - London

Storm over Cape Cod

Famous names fight wind farm plan in millionaires' playground

By Leonard Doyle in Hyannis, Cape Cod
Friday, 4 July 2008

As she put the finishing touch to a watercolour outside the gated community of Oyster Harbours, Nancy Walton wrinkled her nose at the thought of America's first offshore wind farm popping up on the horizon of Nantucket Sound. "I believe in wind power," she said, "but these will be higher than the Statue of Liberty. There are so precious few places on earth as unspoilt as this. Why can't they just put them somewhere else?"

Oyster Harbours is ground zero in a very uncivil war in which some of the wealthiest and most famous people in the country have joined forces with one of America's dirtiest businesses – the coal industry – to block an ambitious clean-energy project.

As Hyannis filled up with traffic ahead of the Independence Day holiday today, there was a whiff of cordite rather than fireworks in the air as both sides blasted away at each other.

So far, the opponents have spent more than $20m trying to kill off the project, which is known as Cape Wind and is planned for a location widely deemed ideal for offshore wind turbines.

During the summer, 130 slowly spinning windmills located five miles offshore should be invisible to the naked eye because of haze. On winter days, when the "snowbirds" (as the locals call summer visitors) have departed for Florida, the windmills will look like rotating matchsticks out on the horizon.

But a problem arises because the wind farm will at times be visible from some of the most expensive summer homes and private beaches in the US, most notably the Kennedy family compound in Hyannisport. And whether Obama Democrats or McCain Republicans, vulgar billionaires or old New England money, opponents of the project decided long ago to throw in their lot in with Big Coal to try and kill off Cape Wind. "This is like trying to put a wind farm in Yellowstone National Park as far as we're concerned," said former coal executive Glenn Wattley, who runs the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound.

Most prominent among the opponents is Edward Kennedy, patriarch of the famous political clan and now ill with brain cancer. Kennedy opposition to the wind farm may be understandable, given that the stretch of water from Cape Cod to the summer playgrounds of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard is hallowed ground where Jack, Bobby and Ted Kennedy grew up sailing dinghies and chasing girls. Other opponents include the heiress Bunny Mellon and Bill Koch, a billionaire oil and coal industrialist who is the main financial force behind the opposition.

A number of those now advising John McCain in his run for the presidency have also lobbied against the wind farm. The firm owned by Charlie Black, Mr McCain's chief strategist until a few months ago, is busy pulling the levers of power from Boston to Washington DC in his efforts to to derail the project, although Mr McCain himself is an enthusiastic Cape Wind supporter.

So upset was the author Wendy Williams by the distortions of the anti-wind farm lobby and the squandering of public money on countless hearings and lawsuits in the past seven years, that she wrote a book about the battle called Cape Wind. "The global elite are simply out of control," she said. "Environmentalism is fashionable among this crowd, but they still drive SUVs to Save-the-Whale rallies."

Jim Gordon, the man behind Cape Wind, is not a member of the Cape Cod set. He has spent more than $30m in the past seven years trying to get the project off the ground. He finds himself branded as a rapacious outsider who wants to pocket extraordinary profits and spoil the famous view. However, for all the well-funded opposition, Cape Wind has plenty of local and national support. Leading environmental organisations including Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defence Council and the Sierra Club want it to go ahead. Locals hope the project will reduce rising electricity bills and help clean up the air they breathe.

Cape Cod has some of the worst air quality in Massachusetts. The fumes from oil and coal-fired electricity generating plants are trapped by the sea breezes and hover over the cape for days on end.

Barbara Hill runs a grassroots environmental organisation known as Clean Power Now and often finds herself at the wrong end of a disinformation campaign being run by the anti-wind power lobby.

"All the money being splashed around to kill off the wind farm is a scandal," Ms Hill said. "The turbines are a perfect marriage between nature and technology and we have had working windmills throughout our heritage in New England.

"We want people to sit on the beach, see the windmills and make the connection between the energy they consume and its production. For too long people have ignored the pollution caused by oil and coal."

On the beach with Jack, Ted, Bill and Gordon

Cape Cod and the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket have been attracting visitors since the time of the Pilgrims. When President Kennedy was alive, war cabinet meetings were held at the Kennedy family home in Hyannisport (where he and his brothers, Ted and Bobby, grew up), with JFK wrapping up the meetings early so he could take his visitors out on Nantucket Sound in the family yacht, Honey Fitz. "I always come back to the Cape and walk on the beach when I have a tough decision to make," he once said. Bill Clinton holidayed on Martha's Vineyard along with Hillary and Chelsea and found it was one of the few places that he could go in America without running into protesters. The Vineyard is also a favourite of Gordon Brown. He honeymooned at the Wequassett Inn in Chatham in 2000 and has been a frequent visitor to Cape Cod.

An Even Better Flourescent Bulb

Brown bulb breakthrough

01:00 AM EDT on Wednesday, July 2, 2008

(Editorial from the Providence Journal)

We’ve all been told to switch from incandescent light bulbs to those fluorescent ones, which last much longer, save a lot on electric bills and are better for the environment. Well, they aren’t entirely good for the last because they contain tiny amounts of mercury, which is highly toxic. The things should not just willy-nilly be thrown in the trash, and people must take care not to break them (and follow instructions of what to do if they do).

But now, a breakthrough! The Journal’s Peter Lord reports that a team at Brown has discovered a material — nanoselenium — that rapidly absorbs mercury gases. It could be used as a lining inside fluorescent-bulb packaging and as a tool for cleaning up broken bulbs.

The team, Robert Hurt, Natalie Johnson, Steven Hamburg, et al., have applied for patents and expect soon to enter into talks with companies that could make the packaging. Meanwhile, drop off your old bulbs at Home Depot and elsewhere for recycling.

Young Bobby Strikes Again

It seems Bobby is back at the microphone, going on with his "just not here" stuff. Last night on Larry King, RFK Junior said that Cape Wind is "going to put out of business every fisherman on the Cape."

What is wrong with this guy? Does he think this kind of hyperbole is effective? Like most of the rest of the politicians in America today, Li'l Bobby apparently thinks the American people are stupid.

I don't think they're stupid. But I sure do think they're angry...Without any of us noticing, we seem to have developed a royal class. Bobby apparently thinks if he just gets his face on enough magazines like Vanity Fair, he'll get to be New York's next senator. I think people are smarter than that.

Coonamessett Farm Turbine Commissioned

Here is Wendy between Tom Wineman of Clean Energy Design and Andre Schlink of Aircon in front of the Aircon 10S recently commissioned at Ron Smolowitz's Coonamessett Farm.  Andre made the trip across the pond to upgrade the controller. The turbine is pumping out clean energy for the farm!
Wendy had a great talk with Andre about the status of small wind in Europe.Come one, come all and enjoy the sight of green power being generated.

Cape Wind Paperback In Stores Now

 Cover Quotes:

"A great summer beach read...Cape Wind is less an argument for wind power than an indictment of our money-soaked political process."
Robert Sullivan, The New York Times Book Review

"Enough political intrigue to keep a John Grisham farn happy...." -- St. Petersburg Times

"A ripe subject, populated with the sort of people who would be among the first to count themselves as friends of the Earth but the last to accept an environmentally friendly energy source if it meant the slightest cloud on their ocean views." -- The Wall Street Journal

"A genuine page-turner...gleefully entertaining" -- Boston Globe


"Breezy and informative fun." -- Alex Beam, The Weekly Standard

"Written in a pithy style, the book is a revaltory examination of the intersection of politics and class."
-- Block Island Times

"Cape Wind, a five-and-a-half-year tale of power and money run amok amid a cast of characters worthy of a soap opera, is a page-turner..." -- Cape Cod Chronicle

A Failure of Leadership

A propos of Governor King's talk

 

                I’ve been giving lots of talks about Cape Wind around the country, and I can tell you – the American people are getting really angry. Both Democrats and Republicans are equally disgusted by what they read in our book about Cape Wind.

               

                At this point, they’re angry about a lot more than Ted Kennedy and Mitt Romney getting together behind the scenes or over dinner to plot about how to kill Cape Wind.

 

                The average American has caught on to the fact that the above behavior is happening in every sector. Corporate behavior is simply out of control. The airlines behave as if passengers are little more than cattle. The insurance companies have doubled and tripled their prices. Food prices have sky-rocketed, while the farmers who grow the food see little in the way of increased money. (It mostly goes to speculators.) Gasoline prices are doing real harm to rural people, who have little in the way of discretionary income in the first place.

 

                Meanwhile, the folks in Washington fiddle and fiddle.

 

                There are some simple things a leader – a genuine leader, that is – could do to bring things under control.

 

                How about, for starters, suggesting that all American who own a car give up one automobile trip this coming Sunday. Since a good deal of the current price of gasoline is due to speculators’ trading, imagine what would happen to the speculators if that happened. The price of gas would drop immediately.

 

                And if a leader helped ensure that Americans kept up that kind of genuine grassroots pressure (as opposed to the “Astroturf” emanating from fossil-fuel-funded outfits like the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound), the people themselves, with the right leadership, just might be able to bring this problem at least a little bit under control.

 

                That won’t happen though. That’s because “leadership” is afraid to step out. Or, more likely, just doesn’t want to be bothered. After all, if they want to travel somewhere, all they have to do is call up someone with a corporate jet, and they’re ready to ride…..