January 18, 2008—The Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) has issued a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) for the Cape Wind Energy Project that finds no major environmental impacts from the proposed project.
The MMS is the lead federal permitting agency for the Cape Wind project, a 468-megawatt wind power plant proposed for Horseshoe Shoal, a shallow part of Nantucket Sound located about five miles from the shore of Massachusetts. Cape Wind Associates, LLC first filed a permit application for the plant with the Army Corps of Engineers in November 2001, but the Energy Policy Act of 2005 shifted the permitting authority to the MMS. The company plans to begin construction on the project in 2009 and start operating the plant in 2009.
The MMS filed the report with the US Environmental Protection Agency on January 11. The DEIS labels most impacts of the project as “negligible” or “minor,” with only a handful of impacts rising to the level of “moderate,” including visual impacts. The report lists the ways these impacts will be minimized, including the elimination of daytime lighting on the wind turbines and the use of only 57 warning lights at night.
The DEIS also found the Horseshoe Shoal site preferable to alternative sites that were studied and found that building the facility would be preferable to the likely alternative, a fossil-fuel power plant. The press release is available on the Cape Wind Associates Web site, and the full statement is available in PDF form at MMS.
