This project has more lives than the proverbial cat.
From S&P Global, Market Intelligence, the wind farm that will not die.
Horseshoe Shoal is a familiar seafloor hazard for
boaters in Nantucket Sound, about equidistant from Nantucket and
Martha’s Vineyard, rising in places to less than 5 feet underwater at
low tide. It is also the scene of one of the most drawn-out fights over
renewable energy in the United States, now in its 16th year with no
resolution in sight: the struggle to build the Nantucket Sound Offshore
Wind Farm (Cape Wind).
First
proposed in 2001 by Cape Wind Associates, headed by longtime energy
executive Jim Gordon, Cape Wind was to be America's first offshore wind
farm, with 130 turbines producing, at capacity, 468 MW. It has been
blocked by a combination of environmental concerns, the loss of its two
original utility customers, and, above all, the opposition of a small
group of wealthy and influential islanders who oppose the
"industrialization" of Nantucket Sound and the sight of tall wind
turbines from their mansions and beaches.
But
it is not dead yet. Last month, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management
issued a final supplement to the earlier environmental impact statement,
or EIS, approving Cape Wind. The supplement was required under a July
2016 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
Circuit, which found that the original EIS did not fully satisfy the
requirements of the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. The
federal government, meanwhile, is set to issue a final decision on the
project this fall.
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