A chicken in every pot, a windmill in every town

The most heartening news on the alternative energy front is the slow, steady turning of local thought toward drawing wind power onto land, and into the public domain.

 

Orleans seems to have turned a few more revolutions than many other towns, with money set aside for a $30,000 year-long study and $1.5 million in a future year's budget to build a windmill to power a new water treatment plant in South Orleans.

 

Meanwhile, Eastham is circling the idea and its feasibility. In Barnstable (what passes for the big city around here), they're already working on ways to power the public sewage treatment plant with local rotation. And the Audubon Society in Wellfleet is having some windy notions too -- provided the passing bird kingdom can avoid getting whacked by the blades, that is.

 

What's so encouraging about this is its small-scale, decentralized, public-spirited driving philosophy. While we believe that a windmill here and a windmill there is not going to make anybody rich, we also strongly suspect that one by one, knot by knot, they could gradually make a big difference. We've seen one work in Hull, a South Shore town as much like a Cape town as you can find over the bridges. We've seen them work overseas, on the high ridges of Ireland where the government better understands the idea of a public utility. Both at the bottom line and in the collective consciousness, we have a deep sense that they move us in the right directions; circular, green, local, conservation-minded.

 

Every one of our towns has enough open public land to consider this, whether it's in wellfields, under conservation (though we know building anything on conservation land is a scary notion to many), or even in the National Seashore (talk about scary, dealing with that bureaucracy). Every one of our towns uses electricity, whether it's for a school, a highway department, or a treatment plant. Every one of our towns has volunteer talent ready and willing to turn the Cape into an alternative energy model.

 

There is the much more publicized model the Cape also could become, home to the first big offshore, private wind farm in the United States. We continue to have big problems with the notion that a private developer should build a profitable grid on the public resource we call Nantucket Sound, even if the grid turns out to be handsome wind turbines.

 

We find it startling that people near and far, neighbors and national writers, don't understand how important it is to hold these energy developers to the same standards we would hold someone building a natural gas power plant, or even a nuke: Where's the fairness in their taking an amazing resource like Nantucket Sound -- plus lots of tax and energy credits for years to come --and exploiting it for their profit?

 

This concern has put us in some strange company, we know, and put us in opposition to people we ordinarily celebrate. But what we see slowly emerging, town by town, non-profit by non-profit, could straighten out these unusual tangles. Because to anyone who says the argument against offshore wind power really is a "not in my back yard" rap by wealthy people along the coast, we say the opposite:

 

We want it in our back yards, and we want it to work for our back pockets too. Maybe it's not fashionable to have faith in the public sector these days (unless it's the military), but we do. We believe our towns would make this work to our benefit much more than a powerful for-profit developer who needs to operate on a grand scale.

 

And that's why we're so encouraged by the local effort to do just that.