Jobs on horizon as Cape Wind project nears

Now that the hotly contested Cape Wind project is in the final stages before construction, jobs–American jobs–are on the horizon, writes journalist and author Wendy Williams in an opinion piece for the Providence Journal.

Ms. Williams, who co-authored Cape Wind, a book about the project, looks at the case of Mass Tank, a small business: “Joining forces with a German outfit, EEW Group, this 50-employee locally owned firm will undertake the challenge of fabricating 130 steel monopiles, each of which may be as long as 165 feet and will weigh several hundred tons.” A lot of steel, she notes, will mean a lot of jobs, not only for making the steel, but for fabricating the structures, and in the end, the project could propel Mass Tank, a maker of household fuel tanks, to become a significant part of the wind energy industry.

Adds Ms. Williams, “Once the project gets going, people who are welders now will eventually be able to become managers of welders. Kids out of voke-tech schools will get jobs that wouldn’t otherwise be available.

“And imagine the jobs that would have been available to these kids years ago, were it not for the vicious opposition of a small group of very rich people who have made it their primary purpose in life to stop American progress in its tracks.”