U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has approved the nation’s first offshore wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod in Massachusetts, a $1 billion project that has survived nine years of regulatory review and a well-financed campaign to kill the plan.
The Cape Wind project will include construction of 130 wind turbines over a 24-square-mile area in the shallow waters of Nantucket Sound, an area within view of the tourist regions of Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha’s Vineyard.
Salazar called the project a first step in the nation’s “clean energy revolution,” and vowed, “This will be the first of many projects up and down the Atlantic coast.”