Sailors in Nantucket may finally get some new scenery next year if former America’s Cup winner and fossil fuel baron (and the ‘environmental alliance’ he helped to found) can’t stall the Cape Wind project any longer. Cape Wind (and if you’re not from there, you might remember them as Brad Van Liew’s major sponsor on the Velux race) has been working on the $2.4B wind power project for close to 15 years, while according to the New York Times, Big Bill has spent millions of his own money suing to block it.
Bloomberg reported yesterday that Cape Wind believes it should clear important regulatory hurdles by the end of the year; a very important date for the project. If they don’t get a big investment credit from the government by the last day of the year, they can’t proceed with the project in time to secure a $200M investment from PensionDenmark – contingent on a 2013 start date.
The bad news? Big Bill, some Kennedys, and the rest of the ‘save the oceans’ bunch (for this cause, anyway) will lose some of the ‘pristine’-ness of their view of Nantucket Sound, and local fisherman will lose some fishing ground. The good news? The energy-backward US will finally begin moving toward the rest of the world in energy progress, the first full-scale offshore wind project in the country gets on the books, and area sailors get a big reminder of how important wind power will someday be.
Oh – and if you’re an enterprising sort with a sailboat, there might be a new s0urce of big tourist money for you…turbine tours!
