I don't know how I overlooked this documentary until now, but it's six years old.
As many of you know from my prior messages, Cape Wind was to be the USA's first offshore wind farm. It would have been 130 Siemens wind turbines, each of 3.6 Megawatts, totalling 468 Megawatts maximum output. Because of the ideal location in the Gulf Stream and the shallow waters of the Horseshoe Shoal off Cape Cod, with the near constant prevailing winds the average output would have exceeded 350 Megawatts. Barack Obama made Cape Wind the centerpiece of his 2007 presidential campaign, calling the project "shovel ready" and pledging to "fast track" the approvals.
The documentary is available for streaming on Amazon Prime, which is how I saw it. I have attempted to explain some of the politics before, this documentary does an exemplary job, and I learned additional details I didn't before know.
I will make one addendum. When this documentary was released in 2012, they thought that they had won, and that Cape Wind would shortly begin construction at last. Now in 2018, construction has not begun and the project is almost certainly dead. The Cape Wind project web page was dead last time I tried to access it, and had not been updated for two years prior to that.
Simulated Image of the appearance of the Cape Wind turbines from a Cape Cod beach
Meanwhile, if it ever gets built, Cape Wind can no longer claim the honor of being first. In 2016 the Block Island Wind Farm went online. It is a small project of five 6 Megawatt turbines 3.6 miles offshore from Block Island, RI. Close enough to Horseshoe Shoal to demonstrate that had Cape Wind been built, it could be reliably producing more than 15X the power they produce. There are more than 25 additional offshore wind farm projects in planning, and a half dozen on both coasts have approvals in place and are under construction.