WIND SHIFT.(Long Island Power Authority seeks developer for wind-energy farm)

It's easy to sell a lot of things in New York, but for a while now it's been very difficult to sell wind, which is to say electricity that comes from giant, futuristic-looking windmills. This is a little surprising, given that (1) there is an awful lot of wind here--New York City is practically an archipelago, after all; (2) guards at Indian Point, the local nuclear power plant, recently admitted that they were worried about being physically overpowered by terrorists; and (3) driving a Cadillac Escalade through the canyons of Manhattan isn't getting any cheaper. The fact is, people like the idea of wind power, but they don't want the towering turbines anywhere near them or, especially, anywhere near their summer homes.

But now the wind-power wind is changing, because this week the Long Island Power Authority will begin looking for a developer to build an offshore wind-energy farm--thirty or more three-hundred-foot-tall turbines planted a quarter of a mile apart and about two miles off Jones Beach. It would be the first offshore wind platform in the country. And it dovetails nicely with Governor Pataki's directive, in his State of the State address the other day, that New York, within the next ten years, get at least twenty-five per cent of its electricity "from renewable energy resources like solar power, wind power, or fuel cells." There are three small wind farms upstate, but Long Island, the geographic equivalent of an arm stuck out of a car window, is a wind farmer's dream.

Three years ago, the Long Island Power Authority proposed to erect a pair of hundred-foot-tall wind turbines at Camp Hero, an abandoned military station and Superfund site on the bluffs of Montauk. But environmentalists who argued that the turbines would mar the landscape triumphed over environmentalists who said that wind power was better than nukes. To date, no organized protest of LIPA's new plan has surfaced, but a similar project designed for the waters off Cape Cod has not gone over well with real-estate groups and the Humane Society, which is predicting a grisly bird-blender effect. If the first LIPA wind turbines work and the entire stretch of ...