The industrial energy complex in question is a wind farm. And the publicly owned land is really water – Nantucket Sound, which separates the Cape from Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. That is where a Boston-based company called Cape Wind Associates hopes to build America’s first offshore wind farm. At a cost in excess of $700 million, Cape Wind plans to spread 130 windmills, spaced a third to a half of a mile apart, across a shoal less than seven miles off the coast of Hyannis. Embedded in the ocean floor, each turbine would tower higher than the top of the Statue of Liberty’s torch, its three 161-foot blades churning at 16 revolutions per minute. The wind forest promises to provide Cape Codders, on average, with 75 percent of their electricity, 1.8 percent of the total electrical needs of New England, without emitting a single microgram of greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide or mercury and without burning a single barrel of Middle Eastern oil.
