Cape & Islands News

Major victory for Cape Wind against Alliance, others

As energy costs hit all-time record highs
Barnstable Court rulings favor Cape Wind

By Walter Brooks

Cape Wind Associates won another round against a group funded largely by the fossil fuel industry in court Friday when Barnstable Superior Court Justice Robert J. Kane ruled that the State of Massachusetts' environmental review of the proposed wind farm on Nantucket Sound was legally correct.

"Until this moment, Senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness...  You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" - Joseph WelchThe Town of Barnstable, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, and a group of residents had all challenged the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act certification which allowed Cape Wind to seek permits to build a wind farm in federal waters off Cape Cod and to bring the connecting cables ashore here.  The judge's ruling may also have saved the Town of Barnstable some very hight court costs as it attempted to blocked the first offshore wind farm proposed in the U.S.

4 0f 5 motions granted

The Alliance and the others failed to convince Judge Kane that the state should have reviewed the entirety of the project and not just the cable that will run through state waters and deliver the electric power from wind turbines offshore to the grid.

In the lengthy ruling released Friday, Judge Kane allowed motions by the state and Cape Wind asking for dismissal of large parts of four of the lawsuit's five complaints, including the claim that Bowles' review of the project was "arbitrary and capricious." He denied a motion to dismiss the fifth complaint because there is an administrative appeal under way.

Heating a home will cost double this winter, another era recalled

The ruling in a Barnstable Court made Cape Wind's victory all the sweeter given the overwhelming support it received in the vast majority of the 40,000 comments submitted to the U.S. Dept. of the Interior in its recently completed study scheduled for implementation this Fall.

On Thursday Federal regulators warned that America appears to be heading into a period of "significantly higher power prices that will last for years." 

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said that higher fuel costs and rising costs for the construction of new power plants are the two main forces that will drive prices higher.

"This ruling is further proof that this special interest group will not succeed.  It is also an overwhelming victory for the vast majority of Massachusetts citizens who support Cape Wind." - Barbara Hill. The relentless opposition to America's first offshore energy project by a group of super-rich owners of shore front homes as news reports indicate the heating the average home here will nearly double this winter, from $3,000 to $6,000, and as the cost of driving to work doubles as well, received negative reactions from many on Cape Cod yesterday. Some asked "where will I find the extra $6,000 next year?"

One Hyannis woman who obviously recalled the Sen. Joe McCarthy-US Army hearing which ended the reign of the worst American demigogue of the 2oth Century by Massachusetts attorney Joseph Welch, when she used the latter's words applied to our own Senator and the Alliance, "Until this moment, Senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness...  You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

When asked to comment of the decision, Barbara Hill, Executive Director of the 9,000 member grassroots organization Clean Power Now, said, "This ruling is further proof that this special interest group will not succeed.  It is also an overwhelming victory for the vast majority of Massachusetts citizens who support Cape Wind."