With Cape Wind Dead, Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sounds Looks to Future

HYANNIS – A month after Cape Wind surrendered their lease to 46 square miles in Nantucket Sound, the company’s chief opposition group still has no plans to stop their efforts.

The Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound remains in operation, and while officials with the alliance are pleased that their 16 year battle against Cape Wind has come to an end they are not quite ready to hang it up.

Audra Parker, head of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound that opposed the project, praised the news.

“It has been a very long and very expensive fight and we are thrilled that we are at this point now,” Parker said. “With Cape Wind done we can devote our attention to securing long-term protection of Nantucket Sound so that we’re not faced with another industrial development like this in the future.”

So what now?

“With Cape Wind out of the picture, we are able to devote our full attention to long-term protection of Nantucket Sound,” said Parker, “So that it is never again threatened by industrial development.  We are exploring several different paths to achieve this goal, including protected designations and legislative actions.”

The group is investigating avenues under which the area can be deemed protected, and thus saved from the threat of any future development.

“Our mission has always been long term preservation of Nantucket Sound,” said Parker, “We were formed obviously in response to Cape Wind but once Cape Wind was defeated we would shift our focus to trying to protect those currently unprotected federal waters in the center the sound.”

One thing that the Alliance will not be doing however is standing in the way of other proposed wind farms in the area.

Plans by Vineyard Wind to install windfarms 14 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard are making their way through the permitting process – without any objection from the Alliance.

Officials and donors with the group appear more than happy to spend their time considering the next phase of their fight to save Nantucket Sound.

 

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