Not In My Backyard: Cape Wind Park

Here's a shocker, Ted Kennedy and Mitt Romney are supporting legislation that will effectively shutdown the wind energy park off of Cape Cod.

A proposal before Congress that would limit the construction of wind turbines near shipping lanes could effectively doom plans to build the country's first offshore wind farm near Massachusetts, the project's supporters say.

Officials at Cape Wind Associates LLC say that the rule, being considered as an amendment to a bill in a House-Senate conference committee, would rule out so many crucial sections of Nantucket Sound that there would not be enough space for their 130-windmill complex.

and

The Cape Wind project, begun four years ago, has proved consistently controversial: Though environmentalists have praised it for providing a renewable source of energy, Cape Wind has determined opponents who are concerned about its impact on fishing, navigation and beachfront views.

Those against it are a powerful and bipartisan group, including Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.)

Their basis for legislation is:

He said the ban was based on research in Britain, which found that the turbines' massive blades could interfere with shipboard radar. In the letter, Young singled out the Cape Wind site -- which is surrounded by sea routes between Cape Cod and the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard -- as particularly unsafe.

Funny that they are ignoring previous research that found no issues though.

Officials at Cape Wind call the concerns about navigation a pretext for killing the project. They noted that a risk assessment completed by a contractor for the Army Corps of Engineers in 2003 found that "the presence of the Wind Park . . . is not expected to create negative impacts to navigational safety."

This makes no sense to me at all other than it's a bunch of fat-cats getting their perfect views maintained with the aid of the fat-cat politicians. How convenient that they went out and found a report to support their view, even if a professional engineering group in the government stated that there isn't a problem.

So, instead of allowing a windmill park that could provide enough energy for the Cape and Islands and maybe help in that little dependency on oil issue, we have the rich having their pristine views. Maybe they should get an additional tax on their energy to pay for those views.