An ill wind off Cape

Memo to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar: In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, "It ain't over ‘til it's over."

The nine-year battle over Cape Wind is far from over - hell, it hasn't even gone into extra innings yet. Salazar's anointing of it yesterday isn't going to make it so.

And thank goodness for that.

Slap a "green" label on anything and the Obama and Patrick administrations are all over it. The costs to taxpayers and ratepayers be damned.

Of course, there are those - and we count ourselves among them - who are huge fans of wind power, but in the appropriate place and at a sustainable cost. Cape Wind fails on both those scores.

The Cape Wind project plans to put 130 wind turbines (down from a proposed 170), extending 400 feet above the water, in the middle of Nantucket Sound. That Salazar says he will insist the developer undertake more marine and archeological reviews and make efforts to make the turbines less visible from the shore tells us much of what we need to know about how "appropriate" the setting is.

While people may argue about the aesthetics of wind turbines on an ocean horizon, there can be no argument that this will be among the most expensive sources of energy ever devised by mankind. (And that's not counting any possible public subsidy, about which Gov. Deval Patrick yesterday was mum.)

The company had put the cost of the project at $1 billion, opponents say it is about $2.6 billion. And in March ISO New England estimated the cost of transmission facilities that will be needed to move energy from all new wind farms in the region to customers at $10 billion.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer and opponent of the project, put the cost per kilowatt-hour at 27 cents, compared to the average cost of electricity today of 12 cents.

And that, of course, doesn't include the price of the endless - and we can only hope successful - litigation that Salazar's decision will touch off.