Political flapping in Cape-Wind controversy

Jeff Blanchard: Political flapping in Cape-Wind controversy

The Providence Journal  on Tuesday, October 4, 2005

BREWSTER, Mass.

POOR JOE Kennedy. Between his personal life and his political career, it's just been one annus horribilis after another.

This summer, former Massachusetts congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II was portrayed on the front page of The Boston Herald as a "skinflint," unwilling to financially help a Cape Cod woman who had been crippled 32 years ago in a Jeep accident when Kennedy was at the wheel. The woman related a conversation in which Kennedy had cried poverty and said that as the head of a nonprofit company, he was not a "bottomless pit" of money.

At about the same time as this story was rocking the Kennedy boat, he was linked to a wind-energy project that puts him at odds with his family's stated position on wind energy. The Kennedys assert that wind farms are okay far out in the ocean or the barren desert, but not close to shore -- as, for instance, in Nantucket Sound, site of a wind farm proposed by Cape Wind.

It turns out that Kennedy is a partner in a wind-power project proposed for Wolfe Island, largest of the Thousand Islands, lying between New York State and Ontario.

As founder, chairman, and president of the 26-year-old Citizens Energy Corporation, Kennedy joined two Canadian firms, Gaia Power and Sky Power Generation, in a bid to build two wind farms, which would produce a total of 136 megawatts of electricity a year, about a third of the output of the proposed Nantucket Sound project.

A July 6 press release from Gaia Power (unrelated to GAIA, Global Action in the Interests of Animals) went virtually unnoticed on this side of the Canadian border:

"As joint-venture partners, the resources of Sky Power Generation and Citizens Energy will strengthen the 36 MW Greater Kingston Trade Winds Project and the 100 MW St. Lawrence Wind Power Project as they are prepared to be bid into the Ontario Government's [requests for proposals] for Renewable Energy."

Ordinarily, such news would merit little notice here in southern New England. That changed, however, in August, when Kennedy's brother Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the lead in warning of the environmental and aesthetic threats posed by the Nantucket Sound wind-farm proposal. He did so during a ballyhooed media junket aboard the schooner The Spirit of Massachusetts.

While professing support for "wind energy on the high seas" but not in Nantucket Sound, Robert Kennedy made no mention of his brother's involvement in the similar effort in Canada. He thus avoided the inevitable comparison between the two projects: the one in the waters between New York and Ontario and the one in the waters between Nantucket and Cape Cod -- location, of course, of the Kennedys' summer home, in Hyannisport.

The Massachusetts proposal has divided the local populace into two camps, both claiming the environmental high ground. But the Ontario proposal reportedly enjoys universal support. "Even if you remove all the politicians from the island," said Frontenac Islands Mayor Jim Vanden Hoek (speaking to The Whig-Standard, of Kingston, Ont.), "it is still a world-class wind-resource centre."

Jeff Blanchard, an occasional contributor, is a Cape Cod-based writer.