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A Mighty Wind

Special interests want to do them in, but wind farms could save us big money. Let’s ponder that as gas approaches $4.50 a gallon.

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The Portsmouth Abbey wind turbine is not among the tourist attractions on the Newport County Convention and Visitors Bureau website, but perhaps it should be. Instead of turning left off Cory’s Lane toward the historic Brayton estate and its famed animal topiary gardens, many now bear right into the Abbey parking lot, in search of a different sort of green sculpture.

“People are drawn to it,” says Brother Joseph Byron, a Benedictine monk who headed the project. “It’s very visible from the highway and it’s so beautiful and so unusual. They’ve heard of wind turbines, but they’ve never seen one. Here’s a chance to come over and check it out.”   

On a warm summer evening, as he waits in the shadow of the 164-foot tower for a scheduled tour group, he shows off the turbine’s inner workings to a couple out for a motorcycle ride up-island. Before them are two fourth-grade teachers from Massachusetts. The turbine is planted at the crest of a shaved hill, spinning too lazily in the light wind to provide any power for the residential high school and the order that runs it. But in the stiffer gales of fall, winter and spring, the three massive blades clock more than twenty-eight revolutions per minute. In its first year of operation, the turbine generated 40 percent of the school’s electricity and $222,710 in revenues.   

Brother Joseph has served as wind power’s unofficial state ambassador since 2004, when he went door-to-door along Cory’s Lane, taking the pulse of the neighborhood. Four years later, his enthusiasm for the turbine is earnest and infectious. His neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, black cassock and sandals seem to assure that high-tech modernity can be reconciled with centuries-old traditions. And from inception to installation in March 2006, permitting moved smoothly.

“The real heroes are the neighbors and the town,” he says.

Anyone can love a wind turbine. But the prospect of 130 of them whirling en masse off the coast does not garner the same affection. In May, the U.S. Department of Energy released a report analyzing the economic, political and technological conditions necessary to achieve 20 percent of our national energy needs from wind power by 2030. Under the DOE scenario, offshore wind would contribute a third of the 300-gigawatt goal. But the United States has yet to site one offshore wind project. Currently, six are proposed in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Texas, New York, Delaware and New Jersey. Construction costs killed two more in Long Island Sound and Savannah.

And then there’s Cape Wind—to date, a seven-year saga pitting the lords of Nantucket Sound against a scrappy energy entrepreneur from Boston’s West End, with enough twists and turns to fill a book. The battle has moved from the front page of the Cape Cod Times and small town auditoriums to the halls of Congress, back to the state courts, and still rages on. In the meantime, the cost of constructing the 130-turbine facility has doubled to $1.5 billion and the permitting is not yet complete.

The thought of sparking a similarly titanic battle here lurks in the minds of offshore wind advocates in Rhode Island.  

“We are very focused on how, as a state, can we avoid that snafu?” says Omay Elphick, deputy director of People’s Power and Light, a nonprofit that advocates for clean and affordable energy. “We, as supporters of renewable energy, have to be more aggressive in educating the population, highlighting successful projects and preaching the benefits of wind power.”

Rhode Island aims to host a wind farm capable of producing 1.3 million megawatt hours per year, enough to meet 15 percent of the state’s electricity needs. A June 2007 report ranked ten sites capable of meeting the goals, and identified two locations, each about thirteen miles off the coast of Block Island, as the most viable. Last fall, the state invited representatives of local governments, state and federal agencies, the fishing industry, environmental groups, academics and National Grid to evaluate the report. In April, the Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources invited bidders to submit proposals. Seven responded and over the summer, a second evaluation team weighed the bids while the Coastal Resources Management Council began drawing an ocean zoning map, called a Special Area Management Plan.

The state has been able to move expeditiously, says Andy Dyskewicz, the state’s energy commissioner, “because of all the outreach we’ve been doing. It was very, very effective to call all those folks in a room, and the stakeholders will continue to be represented through the SAMP process. We’ve wanted to keep the world in the loop from day one and I think we’ve done a pretty good job.”