Final Farewell to a Wind Energy Debacle

Accountability for Deception and Misrepresentation Absent

According to the June 6 Cape Cod Times (see timeline for article) a contract award has been given to Atlantic Coast Dismantling LLC to demolish Falmouth’s two municipal wind turbines. It’ll come with a reported cost of nearly $40K with additional funds to be determined for electrical work and site restoration.

The other notable town taxpayer cost cited in the article, a minimum payment of $975,000 to resolve the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Grant used to purchase and construct Falmouth’s second wind turbine. You may recall that the original ARRA Grant converted to a loan when the wind turbines were ordered by the Court to stop operations due to causing a condition of nuisance.

The State and the State’s consultant representation (MA Clean Energy Center) incentivized the town’s staff stooges that bigger wind turbines would translate into a bigger revenue stream. Town taxpayers, the innocent lemmings in all of this, were sold a bill of goods; industrial-size wind turbines knowingly could not be safely located in residential neighborhoods. The cast of characters having complicity in this debacle is far reaching.

Yet, for all the lies and deciet, all the hundreds of sleepless nights, all the millions of taxpayer dollars to reach this point – the root cause of my issue is Falmouth taxpayers will be levied another million dollars.

For what?

A lesson of trust in government accountability?

Can A Host Community Agreement Defend Against Nuisance?

If an unexpected or unanticipated nuisance condition befalls a resident or Falmouth neighborhood after implementation of Mayflower Wind’s project components in Falmouth, will A Community Host Agreement provide any legal protection or relief?

Once it’s there, and neighbors and neighborhoods begin sensing an unreasonable noise, vibrations or health impacts, it’ll be impossible to stop and the offshore wind project will have a free reign.

If we don’t pay attention to it now, we won’t be able to fight it later.

Falmouth, like many other Southeastern Massachusetts communities hosting land-based industrial wind energy systems, offer important lessons for decision-makers (state, regional & local) to draw upon as Falmouth embarks on being used (again) as a host for an offshore wind energy project.

It was 10 years ago impacted neighbors of Falmouth’s misplaced turbines sought legal protection from the injurious noise, vibration and interrupted use of their private property imposed by turbines too close. Unfortunately, the protection sought was not supported by town officials, its administration or a vast majority of community residents. Their interests lay deeply rooted in a focus toward a municipal revenue-stream and an avoidence of cost burdening remedies needed by the community’s afflicted few.

Ten years later, Falmouth’s past misfortune rears it’s evil head again.

This time, an offshore wind project, proposing its components to make landfall in and on Falmouth. Mayflower Wind has requested exemption from Falmouth’s zoning bylaws. In particular the Nuisance Bylaw, claiming that its restrictions, requirements and the discretionary nature of local authority interpretations would create economic viability and phase completion deadline uncertainties.

Project uncertainties are a two-way street. Falmouth’s wind experience teaches a valued lesson to other communities as well as our own. Uncertainties (i. e. inadequate data, modeling limitations, incomplete scientific representations, agenda driven political management), require every local resident the right to legal protection. That is what should be important, and more powerful than any promise of municipal compensation.

In this particular case, any single Falmouth resident’s protection from nuisance is a matter of law, adopted by Falmouth Town Meeting for the community’s best interest, endorsed and ratified by the State Legislature for the public’s best welfare.

Can a Mayflower Wind Host Community Agreement with the Town of Falmouth do that?

Fast-Tracking Offshore Wind In Massachusetts – A Community’s Cost

In November 2020, the state’s Department of Public Utilities (DPU) issued an Order approving long-term contracts of the 804 MW Mayflower Wind offshore wind farm with the Commonwealth’s Electric Distribution Companies.  In March 2021 a bipartisan bill was signed into law authorizing the Commonwealth to procure 2.4 GW more offshore wind power.  

All the while Falmouth residents concerned themselves with essential local services and local sustainability challenges as a result of the continuing pandemic.  They didn’t know it then, but those pesky status updates about the town’s two wind turbines, coupled with State’s unbridled quest for more offshore wind energy, signaled a new and foreboding wind warning for Falmouth.

In December 2021, Mayflower Wind announced its offshore wind energy project would make landfall at Falmouth Heights.  In discussion with Mayflower, the town communicated that it preferred landfall be made at the less populated Surf Drive area.  The town only became aware of Mayflower’s Falmouth Heights landfall intention as a result of a state notice informing the town that Mayflower had filed with the state its preferred route and an alternate route, both of which transit under Falmouth Heights.  A “good-faith” action by Mayflower to work collaboratively with Falmouth, to ensure transparency and to resolve any outstanding community stakeholder concerns?

The Massachusetts Energy Facilities Siting Board (EFSB), according to its website, is responsible for ensuring the state has a “reliable energy supply, with a minimum impact on the environment, at the lowest possible cost.”  To that end, the siting board will determine whether the proposed transmission landfall at Falmouth Heights should be constructed and whether Mayflower’s requested local zoning exemptions will be approved.

The question looming largest in Falmouth — Can state government (EFSB) bypass local zoning control with a one-size-fits-all, state-dictated, top-down zoning exemption policy? 

Falmouth’s representative Town Meeting has adopted local zoning code to take into account the best interests of their residents.  The state has ratified these existing Falmouth zoning bylaws.  It’s been long established and fundamentally understood by the legislature that empowering cities and towns with an easier path to shape zoning code at the local level is not just effective, but it efficiently addresses local strategic planning development, coupled with best protecting the safety and welfare of its residents.

First and foremost, a town’s top priority is to make sure that its residents are safe.  The state has provided this tool to Commonwealth cities and towns by way of local zoning powers.  It’s clear Mayflower’s landfall in Falmouth Heights, transmission pathways through densely populated neighborhoods, and electricity conversion substations will have substantial and specific impacts.  Yet, Falmouth’s local zoning control tool stands to be removed from its municipal decision-making tool box.  

To meet its climate goals, Massachusetts has set offshore wind energy output deadlines. To accelerate production, the path of least resistance is through a policy blueprint that eliminates local permitting and zoning processes.  Said by the developers in the offshore wind industry… local permitting and zoning processes add tens of thousand of dollars to projects and hold-up time-sensitive state energy production mandates.

The pending Energy Facility Siting Board decision to allow Mayflower Wind to make landfall in Falmouth is a matter of major public investment.  The pending Energy Facility Siting Board decision is a matter of equal investment to the Falmouth community and its zoning bylaws.  For it is they, a second-time wind energy host community, that will have to bear the impacts in, through and under… their backyard again.

Fast-Tracking Offshore Wind In Massachusetts: The Cost – Municipal Decision Making on Local Zoning Control.