Audubon mulls wind power -- for wildlife sanctuary in Wellfleet

Looking to have the greenest building in the state

by Jack Coleman, capecodtoday.com correspondent
 
Mass Audubon, the largest conservation organization in New England, is planning to build a meteorological ("met") tower at its wildlife sanctuary in South Wellfleet to determine if the site is suitable for a wind turbine.

Jack Clarke, Mass Audubon's director of public policy and government relations, described Audubon's plans at Clean Power Now's annual meeting on Saturday in Hyannis.

Mass Audubon's Jack Clarke. Photo by Jack Coleman.

"Our goal this summer is to have the greenest building in the state," Clarke said as guest speaker at the meeting, which drew 80 people from the Cape and islands and across the state. He said Audubon is already the leading purchaser of electricity generated by wind in New England.

The 1,100-acre wildlife sanctuary in South Wellfleet is one of the most popular attractions on the Cape and draws thousands of visitors every year to its pine woodlands, salt marshes, freshwater ponds, beaches and gardens brimming with hummingbirds.

The Mass Audubon Challenge

"We are trying to do everything we can," Clarke said with photovoltaics, hydrothermal and wind energy.
Clarke said Mass Audubon's tentative approval of the Cape Wind project, known as "the Mass Audubon Challenge," is not a challenge to Cape Wind alone.

Cape Wind "will set the standard" for all other offshore wind projects in this country, Clarke said. "If we don't get it right with this project, I think the industry will be looking in other places and it won't be in the U.S."

In the course of one day last winter, Clarke met with officials from the Army Corps of Engineers "and challenged them to get it right," called Minerals Management Service "and challenged them to get it right," spoke with Cape Wind's Jim Gordon, Mass. Technology Collaborative's Greg Watson and the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound's Susan Nickerson - "and challenged them to get it right."

Cape Wind "will set the standard" for all other offshore wind projects in this country, Clarke said. "If we don't get it right with this project, I think the industry will be looking in other places and it won't be in the U.S."

Data Gaps

Clarke described the Mass Audubon Challenge, aided with photos, graphs and other data in a PowerPoint presentation. Audubon identified three significant "data gaps" in Cape Wind's draft environmental impact statement that warrant further research:

• "nighttime distribution and behavior of hundreds of thousands of long-tailed ducks in and around Horseshoe Shoal.
• "movement of endangered terns and threatened plovers during the late summer to early fall migration; and
• "abundance and distribution of migrating songbirds."

The challenge also requires that these gaps in the data are addressed with a finding of "no significant threat" for Audubon to give its full support to Cape Wind, along with additional conditions. These include:

• adoption of an adaptive management plan, including a rigorous three-year monitoring program starting at construction of the project.
• mitigation measures in the event of "significant adverse environmental impacts."
• compensation for use of public lands and waters.
• enforceable decommissioning of any abandoned turbines
• a comprehensive postconstruction monitoring program modeled on similar efforts for offshore wind farms in Denmark.
• creation of an independent peer review panel to collect, analyze and disseminate data collected during monitoring.
• establishing a mitigation fund by an independent third party.

"We have serious concerns and we are raising them," Clarke said. But based on the research to date, "our opinion is that Cape Wind will not pose an ecologically significant threat to birds and associated marine habitat. That's our conclusion on what we know now."

Clarke said Cape Wind must be considered within the larger context of ominous threats to wildlife from climate change. "Production of energy always entails some level of impact," Clarke said. "We've got tentative conclusions about Cape Wind but there are some things that we have already documented and that we know, and that is the climate experiencing rapid change - climate warming, oil spills, strip mining, air pollution."

"When we talk about protecting endangered and rare, threatened rare species on Nantucket Sound, bird species, the biggest threat, right now, is global warming," Clarke said.

Coastal areas like the Cape and islands are among those most vulnerable to more abrupt and severe storms wrought by global warming, Clarke said. "The first thing that's affected along our shoreline are our barriers, our barrier beaches" -- Sandy Neck, Monomoy, Coast Guard Beach, Nauset Beach, Race Point. "Overwash" to these beaches from more frequent storms and rising sea levels poses a serious threat to endangered birds and their habitat, he said.

Mass Audubon's Jack Clarke addresses members of Clean Power Now at the pro-wind farm organization's annual meeting in Hyannis. Photo by Jack Coleman.

"The greatest threat is global warming," Clarke said.

The actual "industrialization of Nantucket Sound" is not Cape Wind, Clarke suggested, it is the air pollution from fossil fuel plants that make the Cape and islands "the end of a tailpipe in the Northeast."

Look over Nantucket Sound from Osterville or Cotuit on a typical day in summer "and what you'll see along the horizon is an orange haze" caused by emissions from power plants. "That's the industrialization, that's the pollution, that's the problem," Clarke said to applause.

"Cape Wind is not going to solve that problem, but if we don't get it right here, it's going to get worse," Clarke said. "It's one small step for a larger, larger renewable energy program I think that we'll have in the United States."
Clarke described visiting offshore wind farms at Nysted and Horns Rev in the spring of 2005, a trip timed to coincide with the spring bird migration. What he saw at both sites, home to the two largest offshore wind facilities in the world, was birds engaged in "avoidance" -- flying clear of turbines. He cited research out of Denmark that confirmed his observations.

Someone asked Clarke his impression of the aesthetics of offshore wind farms in Denmark. He answered in three words -- "elegant, tranquil and serene" and not, he added, "the industrialization of Horns Rev."
"Where we did see problems" in Denmark, Clarke said, was with drilling for natural gas from offshore rigs. "The birds are attracted to the flames, the burnoff from the methane, and the water was black with dead birds" (emphasis added).

Cape Wind's communications director, Mark Rodgers, spoke after Clarke and described Cape Wind's work toward meeting the conditions of the Mass Audubon Challenge.

"Cape Wind certainly does appreciate what Mass Audubon has been doing and we've been taking their comments very seriously," Rodgers said. "Like Mass Audubon, we've been hard at work in ongoing avian research and monitoring in Nantucket Sound."

A 45-day period of avian research from a barge on Horseshoe Shoal was completed earlier this month, Rodgers said, with the data still being analyzed.

Jack Coleman blogs in support of Cape Wind at wind farmer's almanac and works as media adviser to the pro-wind farm Clean Power Now citizens' advocacy group.