LIPA Chairman Advises A 'No' on Offshore Windmills
BYLINE: By BRUCE LAMBERT
DATELINE: GARDEN CITY, N.Y., Aug. 23
Soaring costs have apparently doomed an ambitious project to build what might have been the nation's first offshore windmills, clustered in 40 huge towers near Jones Beach.
The Long Island Power Authority's new chairman, Kevin S. Law, is recommending that the agency cancel the electricity-generating project and said he expected the other board members to agree at their Sept. 25 meeting.
''My decision is based strictly on the costs,'' Mr. Law said, citing a consultant's study, released on Thursday, that estimates the project's cost at $811 million, making wind power more than twice as expensive as that from conventional sources.
Mr. Law's decision was reported in Thursday's editions of Newsday.
The original estimate for the windmills was about $200 million. The price increased to $356 million when FPL Energy of Florida won the bid for the project in 2003. Then last year, rising costs nearly doubled the estimate to $700 million.
The windmills were a pet project of the administration of Gov. George E. Pataki and the power authority, a state agency. The project won accolades from numerous environmental groups and several public officials, while a few local groups and officials objected to obstructing the view of the horizon and questioned the windmills' potential effects on birds and fish.
Mr. Law, whom Gov. Eliot Spitzer appointed this year to head the power authority, said he still wanted to harness the wind. ''I support renewable projects,'' he said in a telephone interview. ''We need to take steps to end our reliance on Mideast oil, and I'm committed to working with the environmental groups to finding a site for wind power, onshore or offshore.''