Silly Rabbit -- I Thought This Project Was Dead -- September 12, 2017

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.