My first inclination was to want to see the thing built just to see the Kennedys and their like-minded NIMBYs cry, so you know where I'm coming from. Then I started reading about wind power, and it spoiled my fun.
Wind power is an expensive fraud. When the contract to buy the power produced by Cape Wind was in the news recently, it was because Martha Coakley claimed a great victory for getting 5% off the
100% increase over standard electricity costs. And that is on top of the subsidies you'll be paying as a taxpayer to the company to build the thing.
Wind power in naturally inefficient. First, the turbines produce electricity at far less than there rated level - what they tell you is always a theoretical lie. Then, wind comes and goes. To use wind power at all, you need backup - usually a gas plant - sitting idle, ready to ramp up when the wind dies down. Gas plants - or nuclear - are most efficient running constantly. So any on-off leads to inefficiency.
From Europe - and California, we know that wind turbines are a maintenance headache. In Cali, they actually set broken down turbines to spin free in the wind because they were along a highway, where people could see how many were out of order.
If you're really interested in the truth about wind power, check out this blog:
A free-market energy blog — MasterResource
They have many detailed articles about wind power, plus a section on Cape Wind. Look on the margin on the right for links to various wind power issues, Cape Wind in particular, etc. I really figured why not, it wouldn't hurt to use wind power, etc, until I was exposed to this blog. The guys have a free market prejudice, but just read the details of the articles and you can see they have the facts on their side. And that's not even touching the bird kill issue, or the fact that wind turbines have killed more people than nuclear over the last ten years by a long way. Yes, wind power kills. ;-)
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