Cape Wind Power Project Clears a Hurdle

The Cape Wind project made a big step forward today, as Massachusetts regulators unanimously approved an comprehensive permit on electric power cables connecting the proposed 130-turbine offshore wind farm.

This completes the project's state and local permitting. It now awaits a sign-off on federal permitting from Interior Secretary Ken Salazar; 107 members of the Massachusetts state legislature have signed on to a letter urging him to approve Cape Wind "as soon as possible," according to The Boston Globe's Beth Daley. The U.S. Minerals Management Agency declared in January that the project would have little impact on navigation, tourism, and wildlife.

Cape Wind has been a poster child for the supposed trade-offs of transforming our energy infrastructure. Opponents say it will mar views of Nantucket Sound from Cape Cod, and kill birds. In March, the Massachusetts Audubon Society -- not known for taking threats to birds lightly -- said its preliminary studies showed that the turbines would not significantly harm birds. The group would like additional assessment of avian flight paths and has challenged Cape Wind's developers to agree to ''comprehensive and rigorous monitoring to reduce the risk to birds and other wildlife."

The personal value of a viewscape is question to which there may be no right answer. But consider ocean acidification, which threatens to devastate marine ecosystems worldwide. It's well understood among marine researchers that the oceans are taking up huge, and growing, amounts of CO2 because of the higher atmospheric concentration of CO2 in our era.

This is rapidly changing the ocean's chemistry, about 100 times faster than at any other time in the past 650,000 years, with "calcifers" -- organisms that use calcium carbonate to construct their shells or skeletons -- at increased risk.  These range across all levels of the marine food chain, from minute coccolithophores and foraminifera, to echinoderms like starfish, corals, crustaceans and molluscs.

Some wind turbines on the horizon seem like a modest price to pay for preserving the balance of life in the ocean -- as long as they truly result in cutting our demand for fossil energy.

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Image: Nysted offshore wind farm, Denmark