Air Power

Robert Sullivan in the New York Times Book Review:

WindfarmIf HBO is looking to develop a series based on environmental politics, then “Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound” is a natural for the option, with the Kennedys sitting in for the Sopranos, Nantucket Sound for the Meadowlands and phrases like “environmental impact statement” replacing “swimming with the fishes.” Cameos will include Elizabeth Taylor as the former wife of the anti-wind-farm Senator John Warner; Warner’s former mother-in-law Bunny Mellon, the nonagenarian Listerine heiress who decorated the Kennedy White House (behind the scenes) and helped establish the Oyster Harbors Club; and Walter Cronkite, who, as the co-authors Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb have it, starts out on the side of darkness only to turn toward the light, or in this case, the wind. The setting is Horseshoe Shoal, about five miles off the coast of Cape Cod, where, in 2001, an energy developer named Jim Gordon proposed what he still hopes will be America’s first offshore wind farm, an array of 130 turbines, 440 feet tall, that would create 468 megawatts of electrical energy, the only dangerous fumes being those emanating from the mad-as-hell multimillion-dollar homeowners on the Cape, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

More here.