Progress can be full of wind, but it's worth it
Wind turbines generate electricity at the Block Island Wind Farm last summer. It is the first commercial offshore wind farm in the United States, 3.8 miles from Block Island, Rhode Island in the Atlantic Ocean. Credit: Getty Images/John Moore
Hannah Komanoff, who served Long Beach for three decades as a school official and county legislator, didn’t live long enough to see wind turbines nearly as tall as the Chrysler Building. Hannah, my mom, died in 2000 at age 89, not long before the destruction of the World Trade Center, which she would have witnessed from her bay-front house opposite Island Park and Oceanside.
The new millennium also saw wind and solar power emerge as viable forms of clean energy. I have no doubt that Mom, a lifelong conservationist and a stalwart supporter of clean energy during her dozen years representing Long Beach on the Nassau County Legislature, would have moved heaven and earth to help get the Equinor Empire Wind Farm in the Atlantic Ocean off Long Beach up and running as quickly as possible.
Mom would have vouched for the wind farm at every public forum, just as in the 1970s she repeatedly urged the Long Island Lighting Company and state officials to treat energy efficiency and conservation as antidotes to filling Suffolk County’s north coast with nuclear power plants.
Big offshore wind farms would have been a no-brainer for Mom. The intrusion of super-tall wind towers and giant blades would have paled next to the benefits: good-paying union jobs, bustling maintenance and support industries, the free harvesting of nature’s bounty, and the climate benefit from producing power without burning fossil fuels.
My mother was a doer with a special place in her heart for big doers. She revered President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, and she knew and admired Eleanor Roosevelt. At a Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. benefit dinner in Long Beach in 1990, she beseeched the audience to venerate King not as a dreamer but as a doer.
King’s civil rights call to action, his book “Why We Can’t Wait,” could have been Mom’s mantra for Long Island offshore wind. Advocating energy stewardship in the 1970s would have impressed upon her that delaying Empire Wind Farm’s up to 147 wind turbines means spewing more climate-wrecking carbon dioxide we can never claw back from earth’s atmosphere. That’s why wind power can’t wait.
This too: Mom kept her word. At a meeting I attended in the 1970s, she told LILCO’s CEO that Long Island’s strengths lay in manufacturing and installing solar roofs and wind farms and energy-proofing our homes. Those words carried a pledge: When clean energy arrives in abundance, we can’t block the way.
By itself, offshore wind won’t stop climate chaos. But it’s a big part of winning the fight. Those hundreds of spinning blades will literally keep carbon fuels in the ground, where they can’t wreak havoc. They’ll also set a positive example for future rounds of climate progress.
In a year or two, work crews are to begin laying power cables to connect Equinor’s ocean-based turbines to the power grid. Recently, I rode my bike along the ocean through the Rockaways and Long Beach to one of the landing spots in Island Park. Once a popular seafood eatery, it’s now asphalt and weeds.
Change isn’t easy, and big change can be wrenching. But I learned from Mom that the pain of progress is worth bearing. I hope to be on hand when the shovels hit the ground, placing pebbles and stones in tribute to my mother and all who work for a livable future.
Reader Charles Komanoff, a Long Beach native, lives in Manhattan
