And it is a good thing.
While many of the things that Edward M. Kennedy championed in his decades in the Senate were good, there were a number of times he got it wrong.
One of his worst decisions was to use all levers of power at his disposal to shut doen any attempt to construct an offshore wind farm in Massachusetts.
It turns out that the turbines, which would have been so small when viewed from the shore that they would be obscured by a pinky at arm's length would have been barely visible from Hyannisport and Martha's Vineyard.
This bit of egregious NIMBYism has finally fallen with the Vinyard Wind project's first turbine coming online and feeding electricity into the grid.
The first large offshore wind farm in New England has started producing electricity, a milestone for an industry that has struggled to get off the ground over the past year.
The power started flowing late on Tuesday. For now, the Vineyard Wind project, located off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., can send only five megawatts of power to the grid from a single towering wind turbine. But the companies behind the project, Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, plan to install a total of 62 turbines with 800 megawatts of capacity, or roughly enough electricity to power 400,000 homes, by the end of this year.
“We’ve arrived at a watershed moment for climate action in the U.S., and a dawn for the American offshore wind industry,” said Pedro Azagra Blázquez, the chief executive of Avangrid, an American subsidiary of Iberdrola, the Spanish utility.
The only thing that would make this better would be if the turbines were state owned and operated.
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