From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Sun Jun 15 2003 - 23:19:47 MDT
This article can be read in full on the NY Times website. But you have to
have your own account, or utilize the one provided by one list member, a few days
ago (tip o' the hat for that)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/15/magazine/15WIND.html
<<The nation's leading environmental groups can barely control their
enthusiasm. ''We're bullish on wind,'' says Kert Davies, research director of
Greenpeace USA. ''Everybody has to ante up in the fight.'' But like residents of
dozens of communities where other wind-farm projects have been proposed, many Cape
Codders have put aside their larger environmental sensitivities and are
demanding that their home be exempt from such projects. As Cronkite puts it, ''Our
national treasures should be off limits to industrialization.''
Wind is the world's fastest-growing energy resource, and after a decade of
federal and state subsidies kick-starting the industry, creating enough power
for more than a million American families in 27 states to tap into the breeze
when they flick on their light switches. The country's oldest turbines have been
part of the landscape on the Altamont Pass, east of San Francisco, for two
decades. And Texans zooming along I-10 west to El Paso top a slight rise to the
sight of a vast field of turbines stretching across the mesa. But energy
providers in the Northeast, with its lack of wide open spaces, have long been
consigned to dependence on oil, coal and natural gas, with only the occasional
small-scale wind project. Then Jim Gordon got restless. The president of Cape
Wind, Gordon is a quixotic sort of energy executive. At the age of 22, he put
aside his dream of becoming Francis Ford Coppola and instead started a small
company that designed and installed heat-recovery systems for hospitals and
factories. Ten years later, after a change in regulatory law opened a niche for
independent power producers, he pioneered the building of natural-gas-generated
electric plants in New England, a region long captive to highly polluting coal
and oil. Gordon eventually developed seven power plants throughout New England
and became a very wealthy man. But with too much ''creative juice,'' as he puts
it, to rest on what he had already done, he went looking for the next
challenge. Wind became his fixation. ''Imagine tapping into this inexhaustible supply
of energy right here in our own state, lowering the cost of electricity,
decreasing pollution, reducing reliance on foreign fuel,'' Gordon said recently as
he paced his company's boardroom in downtown Boston. ''We're feeding oil
cartels whose whims move our economy and our armies. With wind, we can free
ourselves from that.'' In 1999, Gordon sold off his power plants. With a Department
of Energy wind map in hand, he and his team began searching for a place to
build dozens of technologically advanced turbines that would plug directly into
the region's energy grid. If he had been building in the West, Gordon would
have looked to the plains, what those in the wind industry call ''the Saudi
Arabia of wind.'' It being New England, he naturally looked to the mountains. But
while the ridges of northern Maine offered plenty of gusts, he says, the
transmission lines out of such underpopulated areas were already clogged. His eyes
then fell on the sea. ..>>
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