A wind farm, at 7.45 miles, you can barely see

The resistance to wind power in Ocean City, a coastline community that faces an existential threat over the coming decades from sea-level rise, is truly ridiculous. Most ridiculous is the claim that, “The sunrise will never be the same.” It’s an aesthetic criticism, that 900-foot turbines installed 11 to 20 miles offshore will somehow spoil the Ocean City experience.

Accompanying this post are photographs taken from the coast of Brittany, in northwest France. Twelve kilometers offshore from the town of Guerand is the start of the Saint-Nazaire wind farm, France’s first. Construction on the project started in September 2019, with the first turbine erected in April 2022. The wind farm became fully operational with all 80 turbines in November 2022. I was there last September and, while the turbines could be seen from shore, they were barely visible at anywhere from 7.45 miles (the closest) to 12.42 miles (the furthest) on a late-summer day.

As our Sun editorial pointed out this week, the opposition in Ocean City is mainly driven by politics: “Trump has pledged to halt offshore wind development should he be returned to office. And while Ocean City may be Maryland’s summer capital, politically its voters have long been aligned with the conservative end of the political spectrum. In 2020, for example, even as Biden was racking up a big 2-to-1 vote tally in Maryland, Trump captured Ocean City’s Worcester County by a 3-2 margin, one of his best showings in the state.”

It amazes me that people who love their grandchildren don’t think about them when they vote. Future generations have far more to lose from the climate crisis than we do.