Gone with the wind

The rich may be moaning about wind turbines ruining their coastal views on Cape Cod, but in Delaware, citizens are ardently battling politicians -- and the coal industry -- to build the nation's largest offshore wind park.

By Katherine Ellison

Read more: Politics, News, Climate Change, Energy Policy

March 28, 2007 | MILLSBORO, Del. -- Peter Mandelstam says he can power 130,000 Delaware homes without adding to the greenhouse gas emissions dangerously heating our planet. His proposed 600-megawatt offshore wind park -- the biggest such project yet unveiled in the United States -- could supply that power over 20 years cheaper than coal or gas, he vows.

The tireless founder of Bluewater Wind, a wind energy developer, Mandelstam has been right before, having built a wind farm in Montana that provides power to more than 45,000 homes. And Delaware is no Cape Cod, where an offshore wind plan has stalled amid bitter controversy for the past six years. Polls show that offshore wind is overwhelmingly popular in this state, graded F for air pollution by the American Lung Association, whose coastal residents aren't griping about their ocean views being ruined.

Yet Mandelstam still faces a gale force in persuading Delaware officials, lashed to coal and gas industries, to go along with his plan. "The chief obstacle is the newness of offshore wind," he says enthusiastically. "It's not new in the world, but it's new in this country. So my challenge is simply to educate people."

Delaware offers offshore wind the first ever chance to compete directly with fossil fuels, and it's a relatively fair competition at that. Normally new energy sources must go head to head with fossil fuel plants already in operation, putting the new developer -- who has to find a way to pass construction costs on to consumers -- at a tremendous disadvantage.

But Delaware lawmakers last year declared they needed a brand-new source of power. Deregulation had led to a 59 percent power rate increase, and they wanted to make sure that wouldn't happen again so soon. So last April, Delaware's legislators called for competitive bids for a new, long-term contract with the state's utility, Delmarva. Four state agencies are expected by June 15 to choose between Mandelstam's wind-turbine project and competing bids from coal and gas.

"This is the front line on climate change," says Willett Kempton, an associate professor of marine policy at the University of Delaware and an ardent lobbyist for renewable energy. "This is one thing we can do right now, at large scale, with no CO2 emissions, and at about the same cost as dirty power."

Indeed, offshore wind could take us to a new energy future, free of carbon dioxide, or CO2 greenhouse gas emissions, faster than any other power source, say industry experts. Bye-bye, Saudi Arabia. So long, global-warming paralysis.

In the United States, wind represents less than 1 percent of all electric power generation, but that's still enough to power 2.9 million homes. The industry is growing fast -- wind-power production shot up 160 percent between 2000 and 2005, rising 27 percent just last year. For the past two years, wind has been the second-largest source of new power, after natural gas.

Today the most promising, and least known, source of wind power is that generated by offshore wind turbines. A newly released study by Stanford and University of Delaware researchers, including Kempton, says mid-Atlantic offshore wind could power the entire Eastern Seaboard, including transportation, with enough extra energy to meet a 50 percent growth in demand. Rapid advances in energy storage put this dream tantalizingly within reach.

So far, however, most U.S. politicians just aren't reaching -- in contrast with Europe, which already has 15 years of offshore wind experience and is racing to further exploit it. In Washington, Congress continues to bicker over greenhouse-gas laws with policy changes so incremental as to be all but useless -- leaving wind evangelists like Mandelstam, combining missionary and monetary motives, as the country's best hope to reach a crucial tipping point.

Yet Mandelstam faces daunting opponents in Delaware. Last June, six months before power-plant bids were officially due, Gov. Ruth Ann Minner and NRG Energy, based in New Jersey, released a joint statement announcing NRG would "move forward" with a "state of the art" 630-megawatt coal plant for approximately $1.5 billion. The plant would use "clean coal" technology, also known as IGCC, or integrated gasification combined cycle, which converts coal to gas before burning it. "I heard the NRG guys were already lighting up their cigars at that point," Kempton says.

Minner, a Democrat, is on record as being convinced that human-caused carbon emissions are contributing to climate change. Under her leadership, Delaware in 2005 joined a multistate effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. What makes her embrace of "clean coal" rather odd is that her own administration calculates that the IGCC plant would emit 475 tons an hour of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas.

Two other factors make it less odd. First, NRG already owns a coal plant on southern Delaware's Indian River -- a facility, dating back to the 1950s, that is one of the state's leading sources of pollution, belching acid-rain-causing sulfur dioxide and mercury emissions. NRG has been fighting state regulators' recent orders to clean it up, but as part of the deal with Minner, it has promised to patch things up and close the oldest part of the plant. Nor, most likely, did it hurt that NRG's lobbyist, Mike Houghton, has been a major fundraiser for Minner and other state Democrats -- so major that he was given a special award at the party's annual dinner last year.

Minner, by the way, appoints the heads of three of the four commissions that will be making the energy decision. Her press department and chief of staff declined or ignored repeated requests for an interview. Houghton also declined comment, other than to say he saw no conflict in his dual role.

Minner isn't alone in paving the way for coal. Also in June, Delaware's two U.S. senators, Joe Biden and Tom Carper -- both Democrats, and Rep. Mike Castle, a Republican, wrote to the U.S. Department of Energy to support federal tax breaks for the proposed new coal plant.

Like Minner, all three pols are on record as concerned about climate change. But it took Kempton -- who bristles with impatience over what he calls "a lack of policy response wildly out of sync with what scientists are saying" -- to do something to make climate change an issue in the state's choice of power. Last summer, he and his university colleague, Jeremy Firestone, took the unusual step of personally calling offshore wind developers to invite them to compete.

Among a half dozen entrepreneurs they called, Mandelstam alone took up the challenge, rushing to prepare his bid in time for the December deadline. He's been "educating" ever since.

Next page: What about the birds flying into those giant blades?