A few years ago I co-wrote a book about a controversy centered on Nantucket Sound. The quasi-social comedy, called Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Energy, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future, told of how, since 2001, a company led by entrepreneur James Gordon has struggled to put up a wind farm in the sound in the face of opposition from the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound -- a long name for fossil-fuel billionaire Bill Koch, a member of the famous right-wing Republican family started by his very rich father.
Bill's houses include a summer mansion in Osterville, Mass., from which he doesn't want to see wind turbines on his southern horizon on clear days.
There's an entertaining movie about all this called Cape Spin, based a bjt on the book.
Mr. Koch may now have won the battle, as very rich people usually do. Two big utilities, National Grid and Northeast Utilities, are trying to bail out of a plan, which they never liked, forcing them to buy Cape Wind electricity. They cite the fact that the company missed the Dec. 31, 2014 deadline in contracts signed in 2012 to obtain financing and start construction. Cape Wind said it doesn't "regard these terminations as valid'' since, it asserts, the contracts let the utilities' contracts be extended because of the Alliance's "unprecedented and relentless litigation''.
Bill Koch has virtually unlimited funds to pay lawyers, and imaginative rhetoric supplied by his pit-bull spokeswoman, Audra Parker, to litigate Cape Wind to death, even though the project has won all regulatory approvals and is supported by a substantial majority of local and statewide residents.
New Englanders are losing what could have helped diversify the region's energy mix - and smooth out price and supply swings -- with home-grown, renewable electricity. Cape Wind is far from a panacea for the region's dependence on natural gas, oil and nuclear, but it would add a tad more security.
Some of Cape Wind's foes will say that the natural gas from fracking will take care of everything. But New England lacks adequate natural-gas pipeline capacity, to no small extent because affluent people along the routes hold up their construction. And NIMBY's have also blocked efforts to bring in more Canadian hydro-electric power. So our electricity rates are soaring, even as many of those who complain about the rates also fight any attempt to put new energy infrastructure near them. As for nuclear, it seems too politically incorrect for it to be expanded again in New England.
Meanwhile, the drawbacks to fracking, including water pollution and earthquakes in fracked countryside, are becoming more obvious. And the gas reserves may well be exaggerated. I support fracking anyway, since it means less use of oil and coal and because much of the gas is nearby, in Pennsylvania. (New York, however, recently banned fracking.) It will take decades to get off fossil fuel, so we must make accommodations!
New England better get ready for brownouts and higher electricity bills. As for oil prices, they are low now, but I have seen many, many energy price cycles over the last 45 years of watching the sector for a living. And they often come with little warning.
Robert Whitcomb is a Fellow of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, a partner in Cambridge Management Group, a healthcare-sector consultancy (cmg625.com), a former editorial-page editor and vice president of The Providence Journal and a former finance editor of the International Herald Tribune. He oversees the news and commentary site newenglanddiary.com.