John Abrams
There’s plenty of talk these days about the proposed Martha’s Vineyard Housing Bank. There’s plenty of talk about the state of the Vineyard, too.
We turned off Moshup Trail into the small parking lot. It was an early April afternoon; our family had been pandemically separate for weeks.
While Island kids slid joyfully down snow-covered hills last week, Cape Wind continued to have rough sledding.
My friends Jamie and Barbara live in Farmington, Conn. Their power was out for a week after the recent storm. The temperature in their house dropped to 45 degrees. Jamie says they wanted their power back for heat, lights and all the other things that electricity brings. But mostly, he said, they wanted to be able to communicate. Everyone in town was driving around looking for places to charge their phones and laptops.
Wind turbines get all the negative ink. Noise, vibration, flicker, interruption of beloved views. Big troublemakers, aren’t they?
Solar panels, on the other hand, are considered to be quite benign. The Nantucket Historic District Commission doesn’t like them much, and some people would rather see roofs without them, but by and large they have come to be widely accepted.
But what about when we scale them up with considerably larger installations that can make a meaningful contribution to our energy supply? Are they really so benign?
My wife and I spent the last week of July relaxing at the southwestern tip of Prince Edward Island. There’s not much there except a small harbor filled with lobster boats, a lighthouse, an inn, a restaurant (we stayed in a sweet little apartment above the restaurant — from our balcony we looked at the beach, the harbor and the Northumberland Strait), endless cropland stretching to the horizon in every direction, and 55 giant wind turbines towering over the fields.