UPDATED: Breaking News: Cape Wind Project Approved

In what is being hailed as a landmark victory for the prospects for future wind power development in the United States, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar today approved the Cape Wind project, a 130 turbine farm off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Read the full report from the New York Times here.

UPDATED 4/30/10 7:49 PM

Here's a video that describes just some of the controversy surrounding this decision, and why it's taken almost a decade to approve Cape Wind:



UPDATED 4/9/10 11:19 AM




As this NYTimes Green Blog article details, the second in a series of major steps necessary to make the Cape Wind project a reality was completed on Friday, when Cape Wind reached a power purchasing agreement with National Grid, a local New England utility company. National Grid agreed to buy the electricity produced by the wind farm for 20.7 cents a kilowatt-hour, an arrangement Tom King, President of National Grid, estimated would raise the average monthly utility bill by $1.59. The next challenge for the future of Cape Wind will surely be to get Massachusetts regulators to approve the contract.