Update On Cape Wind -- Only Thing Taking Longer Is Keystone XL -- September 12, 2014

Updates

December 2, 2017: dead, RIP. 
 

Original Post

Boston Bz Journal is reporting:

It looks like Cape Wind Associates LLC is going to stay closer to home after all: The developer has reportedly signed a lease agreement with the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center to use an industrial terminal that the agency is building on the New Bedford waterfront, presumably for staging and assembly of Cape Wind's 130-turbine wind turbine project that would go up in Nantucket Sound.

Cape Wind, the paper reported, will file paperwork next week to modify its permit with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to allow extensive construction work for the Cape Wind project to take place in New Bedford. The federal permit, as it stands now, requires the bulk of the on-land work to take place at a marine industrial park in North Kingstown, R.I. In July, the overseers of the Quonset industrial park in North Kingstown approved a lease option with Cape Wind for 14 acres there.

At the time, a Cape Wind spokesman was cagey when I asked him about what Cape Wind would be doing in North Kingstown and if the Quonset lease option meant New Bedford was off the table. Cape Wind President Jim Gordon is well aware that the Patrick administration has long made it a priority for the work to be done in New Bedford instead.

They hope to get started sometime in 2015.

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A Note to the Granddaughters

We spent some time in New Bedford over the past four years when the granddaughters were living in the Boston area.

New Bedford was the "whale oil capital" of the world at one time; it was known as the city that lit the world. The city supplied the oil that lit the gas lamps. Moby Dick and Herman Melville started there; we visited the church where Melville sat.

Today, New Bedford looked to be in a deep economic depression. My hunch is that the wind turbine manufacturing there will help, but not much. It was a very, very depressing city to visit because of the history it was, and the present it is. The whaling museum was incredible. I would go back to New Bedford just for the museum. And the quaint little coffee shops across the street. And the US National Park Service in the immediate area.