The denial of a permit for an undersea cable is not expected to sink the Cape Wind offshore wind farm project, say advocates of the proposed wind farm that would be located in Nantucket Sound. Even before the Cape Cod Commission voted to reject an application for a permit for an undersea cable to carry electricity from the offshore wind turbines to land, CleanTech.org was reporting that advocates said the expected rejection was not going to sink the project.
“I don’t think it’s going to have any substantive impact. We’re going to move forward in the permitting of the project,” Mark Rodgers, spokesman for Cape Wind Associates, told Cleantech.com.
That’s because the state of Massachusetts, not the Cape Cod commission, has final say over the cable.
“According to Massachusetts law, the Massachusetts Energy Facility Siting Board has final authority on this matter,” said Rodgers. “They approved these cables in 2005, they conducted a 39 month, quasi-judicial, adjudicatory hearing process on everything having to do with these cables, and determined that the cables and the project would provide substantial benefits to Massachusetts.”
The Cape Wind project has attracted a small, but powerful, stable of opponents, including U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, who has a house on Cape Cod, along with other famous Cape Cod residents such as author David McCullough, who object that the wind farm will ruin their view.
Cape Wind Associates says that, from the closest beach on Cape Cod, in clear conditions, the wind turbines will appear one half-inch above the horizon. That’s their artist’s rendering above.
The Cape Wind project is being developed by Energy Management, which has already spent $30 million on the proposed wind project. Energy Management has been in existence for almost 30 years, building and operating a number of natural gas plants, which it sold a few years ago. Rodgers says the company is “putting at risk, admittedly, some of the capital from past business success in natural gas to try and bring utility scale clean energy to Massachusetts.”
Construction of the 468 megawatt wind farm, if approved by state and federal regulators, would cost around $1 billion, and Energy Management currently is working with Lehman Brothers on financing that through a combination of debt and equity, which is common for traditional power projects.
