What do you do when local opposition to an offshore wind farm project dries up, when the NIMBY crowd runs out of steam, when the federal government gives the green light and extends every permit and courtesy the law will allow, when the technology is tested and proven, and there’s nothing left to do but build it? Well, then you go looking for money — lots of it. After more than a decade of preparation, the Massachusetts wind energy company Cape Wind has done just that — and the results are looking promising.

A $2 billion agreement with Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ penned last week catapults Cape Wind to a commanding lead in the race to be the first offshore wind project in the U.S. When complete, 130 turbines in Nantucket Sound will generate 468 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 100,000 to 200,000 households in the Cape Cod region, depending on the season. If the company can get construction started this year, Cape Wind’s clean power could begin turning on lights from Buzzards Bay to Provincetown by 2015.

While wind project developers like to play matters involving finances close to the vest, Jim Lanard, president of the Offshore Wind Development Coalition, an industry group, says the deal probably means the Bank of Tokyo is going to go out to find groups of investors or other banks to spread around the risks, the capital, and, presumably, the wealth. Although that leaves an additional $600 million that must be raised from other sources, according to the Cape Cod Times, it nevertheless provides a critical financial element to getting the wind farm underway.

Even if Cape Wind is the first offshore wind development in the United States, it will be No. 55 or 56 in the world. And not being an early adopter (just this once) might pay off for the U.S. During the 10 or more years Cape Wind spent navigating NIMBYs, lawsuits, and regulatory hurdles, the project’s planners have had the opportunity “to study all the experience of European offshore wind projects — what did they do right, what did they learn,” Lanard says. “We’ll see a more efficient project than what happened in Europe.”

In addition, Lanard says, years of watching Cape Wind’s courtroom dramas have probably taught future U.S. offshore developers to avoid the most obvious objections by planning their proposed wind farms just a bit further offshore, out of sight for beachfront homes and yacht captains.

The project does have some dedicated detractors. The Wampanoag Tribe of Cape Cod has voiced objections to the project based on its cultural reverence for unobstructed seaside vistas, but the tribe’s objections have not met success in court. Other groups and individuals have sworn to oppose Cape Wind to the end, citing concerns ranging from rate structures to the possibility that marine animals might be disturbed during construction. But with EPA approval, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permits in hand, and now the funding deal, the developers seem poised to move ahead.

The offshore winds in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic, which blow not far from major urban centers, create the perfect conditions for more development like this, says Fara Courtney, executive director of the U.S. Offshore Wind Collaborative, a nonpartisan group interested in the public benefits of offshore wind. Cape Wind’s proposed 3.6-megawatt turbines, with blades half the length of a football field on towers soaring 300 feet (plus a 60-foot base underwater), provide double the energy production capacity of land-based wind turbines.

Lanard says he knows of offshore wind developers who have already committed to even larger, six-megawatt turbines. Arranged in clusters of 70 towers or more (typical utility-scale, land-based wind farms range from 25 to 50 towers), offshore wind farms could fuel the energy needs of the entire East Coast.

The U.S. Department of Energy has set a goal for the nation to produce 54 gigawatts from offshore wind by 2030 — enough electricity to power more than 10 cities the size of New York. Courtney says if the resource were fully harnessed, wind farms off the coasts could theoretically produce 900 gigawatts of electricity, more than enough to power the entire U.S.

Offshore wind prospects in Maryland received a boost recently with the approval of a $1.7 billion subsidy for wind-farm development financed by a $1.50 add-on to ratepayer bills statewide. Wind farms are also proposed for the waters off of Delaware, Rhode Island, and in the Gulf of Mexico, among other places.

With utility-scale, grid-connected offshore wind projects costing $2 billion a pop, and with the large number of “contingencies” involved, Lanard says it’s not a complete shock that a foreign investment firm would be pioneering the first offshore wind project in the U.S. “The Bank of Tokyo is highly respected,” he says, and its association with the Mitsubishi trading company, which has more than tested the waters of offshore wind technology, “might provide an added bonus” when seeking additional investors.

Lanard says individual financiers are still hesitant to jump into these projects with both feet. Europe has responded with a renewable energy investment consortium concept led by companies like Green Giraffe that help attract private funds to the ever-expanding list of wind energy projects off its coasts.

In the U.S., wind energy recently got a boost when Congress renewed the Wind Energy Production Tax Credit until Dec. 31, 2013. Experts say renewable energy costs are now significantly lower in contract price than energy produced by new fuel-burning power plants of any type, including natural gas.

Lanard says the tax credits have helped and “they need to continue.” But the farms can provide benefits beyond just power. Far from being the fabled eyesores bandied about in court cases, Lanard predicts wind farms will become popular tourist attractions. Mother Nature seems to agree that wind turbines can provide beneficial habitat for marine life, as this video from a Netherlands offshore wind project hints.

Even with the money, however, the job won’t be simple. Marine environments are challenging to work in for obvious reasons, and there are other concerns that will demand special care during installation. For example, ships and construction crews will need to employ licensed whale spotters authorized to call a halt to activity when endangered species such as right whales appear in the vicinity.

Still, Lanard speculates that over the next 12 months, U.S. bankers will be keeping a close eye on happenings off Nantucket. And as for those locals who fought the project for so long? Witnessing the energy future take shape over the past couple of weeks has inspired me to take up the quill pen and style some old-school verse.

There once was a man from Nantucket
Who used energy up by the bucket
A wind farm comes in
And cleans up the sin
He can now burn his lights and say “F*#K IT!”

Want to know the real reason that rooftop solar panels haven’t spread across the United States yet? Slap a few panels on your roof some night and wait for the local code enforcer to notice them. Then count the citations as they roll in.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, we’ve got the technology to power our lights with solar, but the red tape gets in the way. Regulatory hoops are holding up solar progress, says the agency (which is somewhat famous for its regulatory hoops), and making rooftop solar twice as expensive as it should be.

Now, to get us over the hump on solar power, DOE is offering a total of $10 million in prize money to the first teams of Americans that can figure out how to cut through the red tape and make solar installation cheaper on a sustainable basis. It might be the first time the government has offered such a fabulous reward for finding a way to get around the government.

With the Sunshot Prize, the feds are betting that good ol’ American ingenuity, along with social skills and public disdain for excessive paperwork, will help us catch up with countries like Germany, where putting up solar panels costs roughly half of what it does in the U.S. The prize money will go to the first three teams that can hook up 6,000 rooftop solar customers while keeping “soft costs” – that is, permitting, labor, inspections, etc. — at an average of $1 or less per watt, roughly a third of current soft costs.

It will be no small feat. In the U.S., there is a wall of tedium involved in getting solar rooftop projects underway. A lot of it is legwork — commuting to the various agencies, wandering the hallways from office to office submitting plans and applications, and unraveling conflicting permit requirements between towns, counties, and states where customers happen to reside.

To make matters worse, a lot of permit officials don’t understand how solar works — they think it’s tricky or untested technology. As a result, more than a third of solar installers say they avoid selling in certain areas because of permitting requirements, according to a report from the National Solar Permitting Database. And then there are the permit fees, which vary wildly between jurisdictions.

“It’s not that solar panels are less expensive in Germany, but the total difference is soft costs,” says Kareem Dabbagh, a design and field operations manager for Sunrun Inc., one of the leading residential solar installers in the U.S. Dabbagh says a solar rooftop installation in the U.S. averages around $5.25 per watt, with a whopping 60 percent of that going to soft costs, while only 40 percent covers equipment.

Dabbagh says there’s little reason rooftop photovoltaic systems should be treated a whole lot differently from a dishwasher or stove. But the whole permitting rigmarole gives solar panels an aura of an exotic technology — rather unlike the reputation it has on the other side of the pond. “In Germany people understand solar, they know they can go to the bank for financing, their neighbors have it, and they want it.”

Of course, Germany, Taiwan, and other countries also promote and even subsidize their residential rooftop photovoltaic installation industries. Many have instituted feed-in tariffs that guarantee that utilities will buy back excess power at an attractive price.

Introducing the SunShot Prize, a.k.a. Race to the Rooftops, via webinar, Adam Cohen, a DOE SunShot fellowship winner with a PhD in physics, conceded that solar might not be for everyone. He said of the country’s 100 million households, 75 percent would have a difficult time doing rooftop photovoltaic systems because of their status as condos or rentals, or because of rough terrain or shading.

But there’s no need to take an axe to your neighbors’ towering oaks or move to Death Valley. If even a fraction of U.S. homeowners adopt solar, the impact would be huge. “If one in 10 adopts solar, and if rooftop solar system prices average $10,000 — that’s $25 billion,” Cohen said — and that’s not counting the value of electricity they supply.

What will contestants have to do to bring their costs of installation down to below $1 per watt? Find cheaper installation methods? Work cooperatively with local code enforcers? Come up with marketing schemes that allow them to sell a pile of installations all at once? All of the above? Or will it be something no one else has ever thought of before?

That could be up to you. If you’ve got ideas, grab your laptop and tool belt, and get started. Just please leave your neighbor’s trees intact.

Susan Peters, who moved from the East Coast to Tucson, Ariz., a couple of years ago, calls her adopted town an “oasis” — never mind that it only gets 12.6 inches of rain each year on average. “I have a very green, beautiful yard with desert-adapted plants, not the East Coast kind of thing,” she says.

She especially likes her 35-year-old saguaro cactus — the kind “you always see in Westerns,” she says. But if her cactus is ever going to land a starring role in the movies, it’s going to need to grow some arms, and Peters says that could take another 40 years. It’s also going to require water — lots of it, and somehow it doesn’t look as if that’s in the cards. In recent decades, the Tucson area has suffered the grip of a combination of sustained drought and high temperatures possibly unrivaled since medieval times.

As they say in the movies, “the West is changing,” and so is the East, and everything in between — and this includes those most dependable bellwethers, the seasons. Now Susan Peters is joining a posse of citizen scientists who are helping track these changes, and their many implications for plants and people alike.

Spring is arriving ever earlier — an average of one day earlier each decade since the 1950s — and for areas surrounding cities, the advance of the seasons is even more dramatic. In February, researchers at the University of Maryland reported that in areas around East Coast cities, spring has been arriving five days earlier than in rural areas, and summers have been lingering 10 days longer, due to the combined effects of climate change and the urban heat island effect.

And it’s not just seasonal temperatures that are changing, it’s also rainfall patterns, moisture availability, and the timing of meteorological events such as snowmelt. An early spring may sound like something to celebrate, but scientists say sudden shifts in any of these may throw Mother Nature for a loop.

Scientists from Stanford and the University of Maryland, for example,  have found that unseasonably early snowmelt in the Colorado mountains causes whole stands of wildflowers to pop up too soon, only to be devastated by early spring frosts. The resulting shortage of flowers for forage can ricochet to affect pollinators like bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds that must either starve, or go elsewhere. Fewer pollinators means fewer plants, triggering a cascade that could lead to an avalanche of regional extinctions.

Too bad for the bugs, but could it affect humans? Most definitely, says Andrew Elmore, an assistant professor of landscape ecology at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. Imagine what would happen, for example, if an important food crop started to flower “at a time of the season before the bugs that pollinate that plant had been hatched.” No pollinators means no fruit — and that means hungry people. “It would be really bad,” Elmore says.

Still, relatively little is known about how climate change is impacting natural cycles in living things. Enter Susan Peters and her fellow citizen scientists who have signed on with the National Phenology Network. (Phenology is just an old fashioned way of saying the study of “the timing of cycles of nature.”) Peters, whose background is in corporate management, has offered her garden as one of the first stops on the Network’s freshly minted Tucson Phenology Trail, the first such effort in the U.S. The trail includes stops at University of Arizona’s Botanical Gardens and Biosphere II, the ecological science station on the outskirts of the city.

LoriAnne Barnett, outreach coordinator for the Phenology Network, says researchers have selected and tagged prominent specimens of eight plant species around town for Peters and her fellow volunteers to monitor. After a brief training, participants like Peters will take just a few minutes every week to record what they see in a booklet that guides them through all the key observations necessary to provide researchers with usable information. They’ll upload their observations over the internet or via smartphone to a massive phenology database.

Barnett says these observations will give scientists important details on the plants’ lives that can only be accurately perceived up close and in person, such as the exact date when blossoms unfurl completely. Even careful reporting on periods of time when nothing appears to happen in a plant will be important to research. She’d like to see other cities pick up the concept.

Altogether, scientists in the Network are watching more than 200 plant species, plus birds and bugs, and Elmore believes having a large number of observers will pay off, though it will take time. Ten years of observations from thousands of participants in the eBird project, for example, has shown that birds have been arriving nearly a full day earlier for each degree the temperature rises.

Peters says she can already see changes, though her evidence is only anecdotal. “I have an elderly aunt and an uncle who have lived here for 60 years now, and they keep telling me that what I’m experiencing is different from what they remember,” she says. By their recounting, Peters says, cacti and humans alike could count on a brisk shower that would arrive, like clockwork, “every single summer afternoon.” Not so any more.

It doesn’t bode well for the saguaros, but then, their work in motion pictures may be drying up. I’ve heard they can do things with the green screen that a cactus in a real desert could never dream.

For nearly 100 years, New York’s fourth largest city sat on top of a hidden river. The Saw Mill, or Nepperhan (“rapid little water,” its original Native American name), rose and fell with the seasons beneath a crowded parking lot in downtown Yonkers. Tiny fish struggled to carry on the cycles of life in its darkened waters, even as a bustling city above wrestled its way through a whipsaw economy.

The river ran through the center of town, and had played a central role in its history — as early as the 1600s, it inspired the mills and industries that powered the town’s expansion. But by the early 2000s, the Saw Mill had not been seen in downtown Yonkers in living memory. Then a few imaginative residents had the idea that if the city could bring new life to the river, the river could help sustain the city.

Paul Summerfield, Yonkers’ city engineer, says that by the 1920s, industry and population growth had turned the river into “an open sewer.” In 1925, a half-mile long stretch was conveniently put away, buried in a steel and concrete archway, or flume, about 10 feet high and 20 feet wide.

Since then, the once prosperous carpet mills that worked the river have faded away, and businesses such as the famous Otis Elevator Company have vanished. By a couple of years ago, in the place of the energetic Saw Mill River, there was little more than the well-worn parking lot for the Westchester Branch office of the New York Department of Motor Vehicles.

“There wasn’t much to look at,” says Brad Tito, the city’s environmental and sustainability manager, describing the neighborhood streetscape. “You would never know there was a river underneath your feet.”

With Manhattan only minutes away by rail, and the competitive city-eat-city scramble for residents, business, and visitors in the New York metropolitan region going at full swing, “not much to look at,” wouldn’t do.

“Something needed to move for Yonkers,” says Ann-Marie Mitroff, director of river programs for the nonprofit Groundwork Hudson Valley, a group that advocates for the ecological health of the Hudson and its tributaries (the Saw Mill among them) and the communities surrounding it.

Around 2005, Groundwork enlisted Columbia University design students and others to do “some early” drawings of what the river might look like if it could be brought to the surface, or “daylighted,” Mitroff says. And those preliminary ideas started people talking about the possibilities.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies, along with former New York Gov. George Pataki, lent their support to the idea. Eventually, advocates for the river cobbled together funding from a variety of budgets ranging from parks to clean water initiatives, to get the project rolling. And imagination took hold.

Mitroff says ideas for the future river and the proposed park came in from all quarters during a series of community charrettes. Her group then brought in experts in fish habitat to help protect and restore native species in the waterway, working into the plan features such as fish ladders and carefully designed fish passages.

The final plan, which got underway in 2010, routes the Saw Mill through 800 feet of restored bucolic riverscape. When it is complete, the surrounding park will include a 1,000-seat amphitheater and accommodations for the arts, community organizations, public markets, and other activities, along with quiet spaces where visitors can contemplate nature, right in the city center.

Last fall, engineers opened up the flume and delivered the Saw Mill into the freshly reconstructed riverbed — and into the daylight for the first time in nearly a century.

While cities such as San Antonio, Texas, and Providence, Rhode Island, have leveraged the Venetian-style canal motif to inspire waterfront revivals in their city centers, Summerfield says what makes the Saw Mill restoration unique is its natural feel. “It’s a real river, with different features,” he says. “The water is calm when it comes out of the flume, then it drops a little, and then runs over some riffles, and then it goes down a waterfall.”

“It’s amazing to see the park take shape as a full-blown ecological and habitat restoration in the center of one of the most densely settled cities in the U.S.,” says Tito. Native species such as the American Eel will once again be able to migrate through (an epic feat in which baby eels trek from the Sargasso Sea in the tropics all the way to the tiny creeks and lakes of the northeast seaboard to mature).

And even before the natural flora and fauna began its comeback, the project was sending ripples through the city. As soon as the job got underway, Summerfield sensed a new vibe in the neighborhood. There was a lot of concern when the city took the parking lot away to dig the new channel, he says, but nearby streets soon bacame busier, simply “because people started parking there, and you started to get more foot traffic,” he says. “The look of Main Street improved, just because you had more people and there was more activity.”

Tito is among those who thinks the newly daylighted Saw Mill will soon begin to attract new dining spots, development, and commerce to the heart of Yonkers: “Who wouldn’t want an office overlooking a beautifully restored open space with water flowing through downtown?”

It’s a clear sunny Saturday afternoon in 1972 in the idyllic suburban neighborhood of Great Kills, on New York City’s Staten Island. You’re just pulling the AMC Ambassador station wagon out of the Brookfield landfill after dropping off a couple of trash bags full of lawn clippings. You’ll stop off next door at the bakery for some cupcakes for the kids and be back in the carport in two and a half minutes, just in time to catch the Mets game over the radio out by the grill. It’ll be a good day as long as the wind keeps blowing the right direction.

Such was life near Brookfield, a landfill that was an eyesore and bane of the community for decades. But after 40 years with this unwelcome neighbor, Great Kills residents learned at a December meeting that they are finally about to have their say over what goes into the 132-acre former dump at the end of the block. An evolving spirit of partnership has begun transforming the site into a major New York City park, perhaps unique in the nation.

John McLaughlin, the ecologist managing the restoration for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, says that when completed, it will be one of the largest chunks of natural landscape in the city, and the first landfill in the United States to be converted into an “ecologically functional wetland park.”

The Brookfield landfill sat virtually in the heart of the neighborhood of middle-income residences, says John Felicetti, co-chair of the Brookfield Advisory Committee, a group of local residents leading the fight to clean up the landfill. He says starting in the 1960s, Brookfield took in household trash by the truckload from New York City. On weekends, the facility would throw open its gates to nearby residences — a gesture perhaps not as fondly remembered as it sounds.

In the 1980s, however, Brookfield was caught in a citywide hazardous waste dumping scandal. A federal investigation found that up to 50,000 gallons a day of hazardous waste in “a toxic mix of oil, sludge, metal plating, lacquers, and solvents” were dumped at the landfill during its last six years of operation.

Brookfield and four other landfills were shut down, and at least one hauling operator and a Department of Sanitation official did jail time. But while the other dumps were cleaned up and restored for residents to enjoy, to the dismay of neighbors, Brookfield lay essentially abandoned. Felicetti says the Brookfield site saw little more than “Band-Aid fixes,” and that the smell kept residents’ tempers flaring.

In 2007, residents filed suit against the city with assistance from the advocacy group Earthjustice, an organization that often represents disenfranchised, or disadvantaged communities. The results were astoundingly quick.

Deborah Goldberg, managing attorney with Earthjustice, says they had an agreement within two months after their filing, thanks in part to the heroic efforts of the presiding magistrate on the case. She “picked up the phone” and leveraged negotiations between agencies to arrive at commitments that ultimately resulted in $266 million in government funding for the restoration and an “enforceable timetable” to get the job done, Goldberg says.

But perhaps most remarkable is what the landfill site will become. The “customary practice” had always been to plant grass on top of converted landfills, resulting in rather “large lawns,” says McLaughlin, the ecologist. But lawns demand costly maintenance, and with their requirements for irrigation and fertilizer, they cost the environment more than they contribute.

McLaughlin, who spent some time working with teams of researchers from Rutgers University, had been looking for ways to restore the super massive landfill at Fresh Kills, also on Staten Island, which reached the end of its long career in 2001. In light of the demand for useful open space, he believed plopping a giant lawn atop Fresh Kills’ 2,200 acres, or even Brookfield’s 130 acres of potentially prime coastal habitat, would be extremely wasteful.

Some former landfills have been put to use as methane factories or solar panel farms. But landfill engineers have been leery of natural habitat — especially trees, whose roots they believed might puncture a landfill’s underground protective barrier.

But research at Fresh Kills has shown that these fears were “based on a myth,” McLaughlin says. With sufficient topsoil in place, trees and even wetland habitat can thrive on a retired landfill without risk of unleashing subterranean nasties. (Tree roots, Mclaughlin says, delve down only a few feet below the surface: “Like anything else they need air.”)

Armed with that knowledge, McLaughlin says he’s eager to begin planting the 25,000 native trees and shrubs he’s planned for the site, painstakingly selected to replicate native coastal ecosystems. Construction is slated for completion 2013. After allowing for a period of monitoring, the park will open some time in 2017, as the plants begin to mature.

Felicetti says he’s looking forward to the next big change, “when they remove all the old chain link fences and replace them with the regular park fences, and the contamination signs come down.”

But residents with a view “can see the green already,” Felicetti says, and the mood at the group’s monthly meetings has changed from “skepticism to real enthusiasm” for the park at the end of the block.

And soon, weekends in Great Kills will have an exciting new flavor.