Alliance To Protect Nantucket Sound - Position

Position

The stated goal of the Alliance is to protect Nantucket Sound in perpetuity through conservation, environmental action, and opposition to inappropriate industrial or commercial development that would threaten or negatively alter the coastal ecosystem. The Alliance supports formal designation of Nantucket Sound as a marine protected area.

When Alliance supporter, Bill Koch, was asked to expound on his well-known opposition to Cape Wind he said "I don't know if you know it, but I was in the alternative-energy business for 20 years, and we looked very carefully at wind farms. We looked long and hard at windmills, and finally concluded that they are not a good form of power -- for a lot of reasons, but primarily because the capital costs are too high. The only way to make them work is with significant tax breaks or government subsidies of some sort, which is why the Nantucket Sound project in particular is just a boondoggle."

He continued: "It's going to be intensely capital-expensive, especially with the initial costs of sinking the towers into the seabed and the costs associated with maintaining them. The ocean is a very hostile, corrosive environment for these things, and that's the conclusion they're coming to even in Europe, where offshore windmills have been very popular. More and more Europeans have begun to see them as a pain in the neck.

"Number two, you get power only when the wind blows, and most people, most customers, want a consistent, reliable source of power. Wind is not a consistent, reliable source of power, and by introducing it into the power grid, you have to adapt to the fluctuations in the quantity going in.

"Thirdly," said Koch, "because of tax breaks and the 'green' requirements now involved with energy contracts, if a Massachusetts energy wholesaler wants to sell electricity, he has to buy a certain percentage of alternative energy. This means the developer would expect an above-average price for his utility, because the wholesaler would have to buy it, and that would add as much as three or four cents to the cost -- which would raise the rates for everybody in Massachusetts, including Cape Cod.

"There's also the visual pollution, which only adds to the extremely high cost of this project, with virtually no public benefit.

"The argument that this wind farm would reduce our dependence on imported oil is pure sophistry. It would have no effect on imported oil. As a country, only 3 percent of our electricity comes from burning imported oil.

"The other thing that's wrong with this is that someone would have to build a peaking plant to even out the supply -- a plant that was operated by something other than wind, and that would have additional pollution associated with it, on top of being very expensive to build. So the whole argument that it would reduce pollution is just wrong. It's all baloney."

In a candid moment, however, Alliance sponsor Bill Koch confided "I was telling one of my guys when this first came up, 'I wish I'd thought of this!' But as a businessman, I said I wouldn't have put it in my backyard -- I would have put it in someone else's backyard!"

The Alliance supports wind power as an energy source, and promotes many forms of renewables. However, the organization is opposed the proposed wind power plant in Nantucket Sound due to potential adverse economic, environmental, and visual impacts as well as the lack of an appropriate review and permitting process and the absence of federal guidelines for offshore wind energy development.