Green Power

So Gordon and his small company have been executing a complex and persistent plan of public information and lobbying to try to win approval for their project, which would be the biggest wind farm in the United States. "We spend about 70% of our time on the engineering and design of the project," he says, "and 30% on public-advocacy issues." He has hired Republican and Democratic lobbying firms in Washington, as well as a separate lobbying and PR firm in Boston. They've helped set up meetings with several of the state's congressional representatives. (Ted Kennedy has so far declined to meet with Cape Wind.) The company ran its own radio ads during the Democratic National Convention in July. One delved into Cape Cod's history of windmill use, which dates back to the American Revolution, when salt produced on the Cape from seawater pumped by wind power helped supply George Washington's army. Gordon has visited an offshore wind farm in Denmark that is located near a popular recreation area and brought a delegation of Danes to the Cape to talk about that project's impact on tourism and property values. "They said that they were concerned initially, but now they advertise visits to the wind farm in their tourist brochures," Gordon says.

One-on-one conversations can change opinions in a way that radio ads can't, says Chris Sherman, Cape Wind's manager of project development. So the company has sent reps door-to-door on the Cape and participated in more than 400 public education events -- some organized by opponents of the project. "People are concerned about energy independence and environmental issues, and you try to capture those in a 60-second ad, but it's impossible," Sherman says. "Hands down, the most successful thing is sitting behind a table at an event like the Barnstable County Fair. It puts a face on the project."

One of the most important face-to-face meetings was Gordon's conversation with Cronkite in the summer of 2003. Cronkite had not only appeared in television and radio ads that questioned the wisdom of erecting wind turbines in Nantucket Sound, but he had also written a column on the topic that was syndicated in more than 175 newspapers.

"I called him on the phone," Gordon says, "and he was gracious enough to invite me to his home and give me two hours of his time." Gordon says he showed Cronkite nautical maps indicating the turbines would be built in an extremely shallow part of the sound that most large boats avoid. He presented pictures of what the turbines would look like from shore -- "tiny half-inch sailboat masts on the horizon," as Gordon describes them.

Gordon spoke with Cronkite on the last Monday of August 2003. Later that week, after speaking with scientists from an oceanographic institute, Cronkite decided to ask Gordon's opponents to stop running the ads that he'd recorded. He spoke with the Associated Press and local newspapers, telling them that he felt the project deserved a full review by the Army Corps of Engineers. He wrote another column, this time urging the corps to "clear its bureaucratic cobwebs and expedite this matter so urgent to our health and Earth's future." Cronkite made clear that he wasn't yet a proponent of the Cape Wind project but that Gordon had at least managed to persuade him to keep an open mind until government agencies such as the corps weighed in.

Gordon hopes construction of the $750 million wind farm will begin in late 2006 or early 2007 and take about two years to complete. He says that despite the opposition, he wouldn't rule out trying to build a second wind farm. "The pioneer always has to face the slings and arrows," Gordon says. "But we're paving the way, making it easier for our next project, or for those who come behind us."

"I envision it," says Gordon, whose family has owned a summer house on the Cape for 30 years. "When I walk on the beach, I see it out there."

Here Comes the Sun

Matt Robinson, clad in a long white lab coat and blue gloves, is tending to a shiny silver machine called a Mini-Labo. It resembles a pasta maker, but it doesn't churn out lasagna noodles. Here in the clean room at Palo Alto-based Nanosolar, Robinson feeds a thin ribbon of aluminum foil through the machine; when it emerges, it looks as though it has been coated on one side with a flat black paint.

Robinson is testing the process by which Nanosolar hopes to make a new kind of lightweight, flexible, and low-cost solar cell. The black paint is actually a solution containing millions of nanoparticles that are made to be "self-assembling" -- that is, they align themselves into the structures necessary to transform the sun's photons into electrons. This is called the "light-absorbing semiconductor layer," one of a dozen different chemical strata that will be applied to a sheet of foil to enable it to generate electricity from the sun.