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Wind power resources on the eastern U.S. continental shelf are estimated to be over 400 GW, several times the electricity used by U.S. eastern coastal states. The first U.S. developer proposes to build 130 large (40 story tall) wind turbines in Nan- tucket Sound, just outside Massachusetts state waters. These would provide 420 MW at market prices, enough electricity for most of Cape Cod. The project is opposed by a vigorous and well-financed coalition. Polling shows local public opinion on the project almost equally divided. This article draws on semistructured interviews with residents of Cape Cod to analyze values, beliefs, and logic of supporters and oppo- nents. For example, one value found to lead to opposition is that the ocean is a special place that should be kept natural and free of human intrusion. One line of argument found to lead to support is: The war in Iraq is problematic, this war is “really” over petroleum, Cape Cod generates electricity from oil, therefore, the wind project would improve U.S. security. Based on analysis of the values and reasoning behind our interview data, we identify four issues that are relevant but not currently part of the debate.

Introduction

Recent assessments of renewable energy show that wind power has, since the turn of the century, become cost-competitive in the sites with the most favorable wind regimes (Herzog et al., 2001). Until very recently, large-scale North American wind resources were believed to exist in the Great Plains of the United States, northern Canada, and central Canada only (Grubb & Meyer, 1993). Although these huge resources are enough to meet the entire continent’s electrical needs, they are distant from the large coastal cities where electricity is primarily consumed—imposing a need for costly large-scale transmission lines (Cavallo, 1995). In just the last couple of years, it has been recog- nized that the Atlantic Ocean also has a large wind resource on the continental shelf, close to East Coast cities. Three or four manufacturers have developed large wind elec- tric turbines designed to be placed offshore, in waters up to 20–30 m in depth. To date these have been placed only in European waters. By late 2003, the resources, the tech- nology, and the economic viability had all come together in the Eastern United States, potentially allowing large-scale deployment to begin by 2005.

The furthest advanced of a handful of proposed U.S. offshore wind developments is in Nantucket Sound, off the Southern coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. This proposal has engendered a widespread, well-organized, well-financed, and politically potent op- position. This movement’s strength, and the apparent contradiction of such opposition coming from a population thought of as politically liberal and environmentally con- cerned, have garnered national press coverage (e.g., Burkett, 2003). A second project was proposed by the Long Island Power Authority for the southern edge of Long Island, with an RFP issued in 2003. At least two other developers are exploring additional possible sites but none have concrete proposals under review.

The Nantucket proposal, upon which this article focuses, seems almost a textbook case of environmental policy debates and environmental mobilization. The project would provide clean energy but would intrude on a beautiful, unspoiled natural area. One can

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see the wind turbines as an ugly intrusion on the seascape or as a beautiful portent of clean energy for the 21st century; as a threat to tourism or an opportunity for year-round local jobs; as a menace to marine and avian species or as pollution reduction; as a government-financed boondoggle or a hedge against foreign oil dependence; as an ex- ample of market solutions to environmental problems or as greedy developers spoiling Cape Cod yet further. Because there is an oil-burning electric plant in the same area, the possibility of wind electricity displacing oil electricity makes the air pollution and energy security aspects of wind energy locally immediate and easy to visualize. However, no public commitment has been made to shut down the oil generator if the wind project is built (they are managed by different entities and their generation is governed by fluctu- ating electricity markets). Another potentially important issue in this locale, one that we will show is not part of the debate, is that parts of Cape Cod are at low elevation, with beaches and salt-water wetlands important environmentally, economically, and cultur- ally; thus climate change caused by burning fossil fuels would have more effect on Cape Cod than most areas. By a quirk of geography and law, the proposed site is sur- rounded on three sides by lands of the State of Massachusetts, yet the waters are Fed- eral.1 Only the electrical transmission line would pass through Massachusetts’ waters. Thus, the permitting process is led and primarily controlled by the Federal Government, with the state having minimal influence. The Federal law governing the approval or denial of the project is laughably mismatched to the issues under debate, with the lead agency’s prime mandate being to determine whether the wind towers would constitute an “obstruction to navigation” (Rivers and Harbors Act 1899; also see Firestone et al. 2004).

The project, as one informant described it, “has pitted environmentalist against en- vironmentalist” (CP6). It is a revealing and rich case of environmental values, beliefs, and mobilization, operating in the context of environmental policy and law. In this ar- ticle, we draw on interviews with residents to analyze the reasons for the opposition to, and support for, the proposed offshore wind development. As a prelude to our analysis of the public’s views, we describe offshore wind power and the proposed Nantucket Sound development. After analyzing our interview data on the debate, we then lay out issues that seem important but that are not highlighted in the debate so far.

Why Wind Power? Why Offshore?

Wind turbines tap a renewable energy resource. Air motion spins a propeller, which generates electricity. As an electricity source, it competes with coal, natural gas, and petroleum, all of which cause air pollution and give off CO2, the primary anthropogenic cause of climate change. Why is wind power being pursued now rather than other re- newable energy sources like solar energy or tidal power? The answer is a cross between resource size, geophysics, and cost of current technology. For example, solar electricity is abundant and it is cost-effective in remote locations. But for large-scale power, wind is far cheaper (e.g., 4¢/kWh for Class 6 wind versus 28¢/kWh for solar photovoltaic, Hertzog et al., 2001). Hydroelectric power river locations are mostly tapped, and there are concerns about the environmental impact of large dams. There are other niche re- newable energy technologies such as geothermal or tidal power, which may be sensible in a few locations but could not provide more than a couple of percent of world electri- cal power needs, and still others, such as ocean thermal and undersea current generators, which are as yet undeveloped in their technologies, economics, and/or understanding their environmental impacts.

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Thus, the short answer to “Why wind?” is: the technology is mature, reliable gen- erators are available, it is already cost-competitive; it produces essentially no pollution or greenhouse gases, and it is a very large resource.

This combination of favorable resources, economics, and recent maturation of tech- nology has led to explosive growth. Figure 1 shows the growth in installed capacity, which climbed to 39 GW by the end of 2003.

Wind power also has the economic characteristic of being labor-intensive; it re- quires more labor per MW generation than any other electric generator (Greenpeace and European Wind Energy Association, 2002). Although modern wind turbines are entirely automated, they are nonetheless large rotating mechanical devices exposed to the ele- ments that require regular inspection, lubrication, and occasional repair. At the local level, wind power creates more long-term employment than other power sources.

High labor costs also strongly affect optimum unit size and development size— larger machines and larger clusters are more cost-effective because, for example, me- chanics, electricians, ornithologists, and boats or trucks are shared across more output and revenue. It is also important to locate areas of frequent high winds, as the invest- ment in machines and labor only pays back when the wind blows frequently and strongly. Size optimization and favorable wind sites are essential for labor-intensive wind to cost less per MWh than coal.

How much potential power is offshore? Although no thorough assessment of the resources has been made, a preliminary estimate was recently presented by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) (Butterfield, Musial, & Laxson, 2004)—in the shallower waters (<30 m) of New England and the Mid Atlantic States, assuming only 1/3 of that area is available (due to shipping lanes, protected ecosystems, and other coastal uses), summing their estimates yields a 95 GW potential. For comparison, that

Figure 1. Growth in installed world capacity of wind power, 1996–2003 (American Wind Energy Association, 2004).

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amount of wind power potential is approximately equal to the entire generating capacity of these coastal states (Maine through Maryland) of 99 GW (Energy Information Ad- ministration, 2004). Currently available products use monopile towers that can be placed up to 20 m depth. As deeper-water mountings are developed and become available, there is an additional 386 GW in the deeper waters out to 50 nautical miles from shore.

These startling resource numbers, the availability of turbines at competitive market prices to harvest this power, the proximity to load centers, and the now-favorable econom- ics raise the possibility of displacing much of the fossil fuel power on the East Coast of the United States. Whether or not this possibility is realized will depend on public accep- tance and the policies for project evaluation and permitting. This article analyzes public acceptance of wind turbines in the ocean; a simultaneous paper by an overlapping set of authors (Firestone et al., 2004) considers permitting and regulatory issues.

The Cape Cod Proposal

A private company, Cape Wind Associates, proposes to install 130 wind turbines in 62 km2 (24 square miles) of Nantucket Sound. They plan to use the new General Electric model 3.6s wind generators, designed exclusively for offshore use. These machines are 128 meters from sea level to top blade tip (420 feet, or about 40 stories) and their nameplate electrical output is 3.6 MW. This development is projected to generate a peak power of 420 MW, adding up to 1,491,384 MW hours of electricity per year, which is about 3/4 the electrical needs of Cape Cod, or 1/10 of the demand of the entire state of Massachusetts (Cape Wind, 2004a).2 Geographically, the developer states that Nantucket Sound is a highly favorable site for wind development, arguably the best on the east coast (strong steady winds, close to power lines on shore, shallow water, protected from high waves, and minimal conflicts with transportation systems). Financially, private in- vestors are supplying about $750M capital; about $12M has been spent to date on envi- ronmental impact studies, erecting a wind measuring tower on-site, and an extensive public relations campaign.

The proposal to build what could become the United States’ first offshore wind farm, in the waters of Nantucket Sound, has generated a vigorous local opposition movement,

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focused around the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound (an organization specifically created to oppose the development). The Alliance seems to have both popular support and a financially strong core. In 2003 it received $1.7 million from 2,891 individuals, with just 56 of them giving $1.3 million of that; the top four individuals gave over $100,000 each, including a loan that was forgiven (Zindler, 2004). A similar pattern with a small number of large and very large donations was seen in 2002 (Zindler, 2003). Publicly declared opponents of the project include several local environmental and busi- ness groups, the Editorial page of the Cape Cod Times, U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, U.S. Rep. William Delahunt, several state legislators, and the Massachusetts Governor and Attorney General.

Conclusion

We analyzed reasons for public support and opposition to a utility-scale wind development off Cape Cod. Apart from differences in beliefs, some of which might be considered based on missing or incorrect information, there are also important value differences.

Some beliefs and values led to opposition. For example, many opponents believe that the project is uneconomic and that wind power will not make a significant contribu- tion to electricity supply. Some apparently evaluated the project’s environmental effects based on readily accessed factors such as scale, familiarity, and permanence; our quanti- tative comparison shows that this leads them to vastly overestimate the likely environ- mental impact of the project in comparison to existing activities such as trawling. On the part of the supporters, there was a facile characterization of the opposition as primarily concerned with aesthetics of their ocean view, and as being wealthy property owners and boaters. These groups appear to be an important financial base for opposition orga- nizations; however, our study and the surveys reviewed earlier show that the opposition sentiment is far broader. Also, our analysis suggests that concern expressed as “the view” is not only visual or aesthetic; it is more importantly a gloss for the value that the ocean is special and humans should not intrude on it, and the value that Cape Code should be protected from the excessive development that residents feel is destroying its character.

We suggest four areas that, we feel, merit broader or more explicit debate. The first area is the human mortality averted by displacing current fossil fuel use. The second concerns the current Federal decision-making process and the philosophical and justice issues in this versus other decision-making modes. A debate on the decision-making process itself could engage citizens both on the question of the appropriate level of government to make the decision, and the question of licensing and payment for the resource (e.g., should wind developers pay, as do offshore petroleum developers, or should the wind be free, as are fisheries?). Third, are the implications of the scale of development implicit in claims for national-scale benefits—at that scale there appear to be very substantial benefits from offshore wind development, but the impact estimates must be scaled up commensurately. The fourth undebated point is the role of wind power in mitigating global climate change. This can be locally understood as balancing the impact of wind power development in Nantucket Sound now, versus the impact of future damage from climate change and sea level rise.

Underlying the current debate are several basic value questions and tradeoffs. For example, the value of protecting the ocean and keeping it free from human intrusion; the value of cleaner air and less human infirmity and mortality; the value of traditions like sailing and fishing in New England; whether there is a right to a local seascape that residents assumed would be there forever; the trade off between proceeding now with an imperfect process to start a clean industry versus first establishing proper procedures, and more globally, whether Cape Cod and the Islands are willing to absorb the negatives

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of this wind development now, in order to set an example for mitigating climate change, a potentially far larger threat but one they cannot solve alone. We suggest that the debate would have a better chance for true engagement, perhaps even resolution, if these values and missing issues were aired and debated more explicitly.