Jim Gordon May Have an Answer to our Energy Problems

Fast forward eight months. A winter ice storm has turned Boston into a huge skating rink. It's 7 a.m., and Gordon sits in the backseat of a taxi with a copy of the Wall Street Journal folded across his lap. He wears a heavy overcoat over his suit and big leather boots. Of course, nasty weather makes the wind blow -- 32 knots today, according to his data tower out in Nantucket Sound. Today his turbines would be churning out 422 megawatt hours of electricity -- if only they existed.

But maybe they still will. Gordon has survived long enough to see a political climate change. There's a new Democratic Congress in Washington with a strong interest in renewables. The voters of Massachusetts have elected a new governor, Deval Patrick, who championed Cape Wind as just the sort of clean innovation the state should be encouraging. Everybody is talking about global warming.

One day earlier, Cape Wind had filed its final environmental impact report with the state. On this frigid morning, Gordon is on his way to hear the man who will decide its fate. Ian Bowles, the state's new Secretary of Energy and Environment, is giving a breakfast talk to an energy business group. Gordon rides the elevator up to the 26th floor of a skyscraper in Boston's financial district near the waterfront. Outside the windows, a single wind turbine is just visible on the horizon -- an experimental project on the shore of the town of Hull -- like a distant dream.

The introductory speaker presents Bowles with a wish list on behalf of the local energy industry. Number three: approve Cape Wind. Bowles's speech outlines a vision for clean energy and technological innovation that seems to describe Gordon's project all but in name. (A few weeks later, the state gives Gordon a green light by certifying his environmental studies and Bowles rules that the environmental impacts of the wind farm "pale in comparison" to the benefits of reducing emission.)

After the breakfast talk, Gordon is back in the old neighborhood, a few doors down from his father's former store, lunching on a plate of pasta. He still has many miles to go: another environmental report from the feds, approval from the U.S. Minerals Management Service, power purchase agreements, and almost certainly more litigation. But he can see his vision inching closer, as surely as he can see the espresso in front of him. "It's right there," he says, hand grasping the air. "This is what drives me nuts. We don't have to worry about storing nuclear waste for a thousand years or what the Ayatollahs in Iran are going to do. It's right there -- so close."