By PETER BRANNEN
Plans announced this week to build an offshore wind farm off Rhode Island have leapfrogged Cape Wind as the largest proposed facility in the country.
Wind developers pressed ahead on two fronts this week, as two new players entered the fray with proposals to develop wind farms in waters west of the Vineyard and Cape Wind put the final touches on a deal to sell electricity to National Grid.
In the effort to develop wind energy in the ocean between Block Island and Aquinnah, Massachusetts will follow the lead of the Ocean State.
Vineyarders Jonathan and Linda M. Haar work in wind power technology, but one thing they share with wind energy opponents is an objection to seeing enormous towers built in pristine places.
And their concern is not just aesthetic, but practical. It would, they reasoned, make much more sense to generate the power as close as possible to where the power is used.
Hence their innovative new turbine, tested for the first time at the Martha’s Vineyard Airport this week: a turbine standing just 20 feet tall, intended to be mounted on city buildings.
On Sunday night opponents of wind development off Vineyard shores — including selectmen, fishermen, Wampanoags and a Republican candidate for Massachusetts governor — were given a megaphone to voice their views.
Hosted by POINT (Protect Our Islands Now for Tomorrow), a group led by Andrew Goldman of Chilmark, the forum drew a large crowd to the Chilmark Community Center.
“We will have the largest concentration of turbines anywhere in the world,” declared Mr. Goldman, who moderated the forum.
It’s a precarious time in the energy story of the Vineyard. Massive offshore turbine development seems all but inevitable and yet no shovels have broken the seabed. And this Sunday a group from the Vineyard and Beacon Hill want to talk about it all, at a forum titled The Island’s Future Blowin, in the Wind.
