Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound

Cape Wind is the story of the ongoing attempt by an entrepreneur named Jim Gordon to build a power generating wind farm in Nantucket Sound. It is also a cautionary tale of class warfare, sleazy politics, hypocrisy, and the entitlement mentality of the rich and powerful.

Jim Gordon, a thirty year veteran of the energy business, thought he had the perfect new project. It was a wind farm consisting of 140 large wind turbines that would generate about five hundred megawatts of electricity. It would be anchored in shallow water in Nantucket sound, where there was no a lot of boat traffic. It would replace a number of polluting, antiquated power plants in the area with clean, cheap energy.

Indeed, wind power had come a long way since it had first become the favorite of environmentalists protesting fossil fuels and nuclear energy. Technology had made wind power not only as cheap or cheaper than energy generated by fossil fuels, but reliable. Placing wind turbines to get the maximum exposure to prevailing winds had become an exact science. Wind power was burgeoning, particularly (and ironically enough) in Texas. Jim Gordon's project would be the first off shore wind farm in North America, though off shore wind farms had been built with some success in Europe.

Unfortunately Jim Gordon did not reckon with the opposition of the rich and powerful who lived and played on Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha's Vineyard. The cause of this opposition seemed unwarranted, even irrational. Despite rather bogus environmental objections that even Greenpeace did not buy, it all came down to NIMBY (Not in Our Back Yard.) The rich and powerful of that area of New England did not want their view of the "pristine" Nantucket Sound "spoiled" by the presence of wind mills.

The Cape Wind controversy contains odd sets of villains and heroes. On the opposition side, was Teddy Kennedy, senior Senator from Massachusetts, the "Liberal Lion" of American politics, and usually a champion of clean energy and the environment. Supporting him was a gaggle of politicians, captains of industry, and celebrities. Oddly enough one of that group included Mitt Romney, then Governor of Massachusetts, now candidate for President of the United States.

Supporters of the Cape Wind project were an odd group as well. They included liberal environmental groups, conservative Congressmen like Joe Barton, and savvy, muckraking journalists like the two authors of the book. The battle for Cape Wind has, during the past six years, stretched from the club rooms of exclusive yacht clubs to the halls of Congress.

Remarkable scenes are in the book which would seem unbelievable if they were not true. Here is the historian David McCullough, his face contorted with anger, shouting about "preservation", his manner quite unlike the calm, academic mien he would assume on C-Span. Here is Walter Cronkite, once the "most trusted man in America", a man in his mid eighties a shadow of his former self, used by the Cape Wind opponents until he, listening to the truth, switched sides.

And finally there was the odd collation in Congress, which included Alaska Senator Ted Stevens and Alaska Congressman Don Young, who would ordinarily be counted to support anything Teddy Kennedy (an opponent of oil drilling in Alaska's ANWR), conspiring to kill the Cape Wind Project.

The attempt in Congress failed. As of this writing, the Cape Wind project is undergoing the final, federal review process. Barring some last minute assault by Cape Wind opponents, the project might well be built. If so it will serve as a triumph of common sense over underhanded politics. But it is also a warning about how the politically connected few can try to kill off a project that would benefit the many.