Catching a Breeze
America's belated push to develop offshore wind energy
Derrick Z. Jackson
April 20, 2018
This article appears in the Spring 2018 issue of The American Prospect. Subscribe here.
Three years ago, after the collapse of Cape Wind off Nantucket Sound, renewable offshore wind energy in the United States was “a stone dead market,” according to Thomas Brostrøm, president of Ørsted North America. His Danish parent company, formerly DONG Energy, has built more offshore wind farms than any country in the world.
Cape Wind, the 130-turbine, 468-megawatt brainchild of clean energy entrepreneur Jim Gordon, was litigated to the grave by local residents as too ruinous to the Cape Cod seascape. It was resisted by liberal Kennedys and right-wing Kochs alike. Despite its environmental benefits, the project also was persistently criticized as a noncompetitive boondoggle with outrageous power costs.
The death knell of America’s first would-be offshore wind farm was arguably most felt in New Bedford, Massachusetts. That city, despite being the richest seafood port in the United States, has long been beset by high unemployment from the decline of its mills. Betting that Cape Wind would help make Massachusetts the first American hub of the offshore wind industry, Governor Deval Patrick poured $113 million into a European-grade port terminal that could handle the massive size and weight of blades and foundations and the skyscraper height of towers.
When Patrick and a host of state officials came to New Bedford in May of 2013 to break ground for the terminal’s construction, the city’s mayor, Jon Mitchell, said, “For a corner of the state that has had its hopes dashed so many times in the past wanting transformative economic development and not quite getting there, now it’s real.”
http://prospect.org/article/catching-breeze
