Against such pronouncements, and to the question of a sacrosanct American horizon best reserved for God’s signature, Mandelstam is sometimes prompted, in a way that seems inevitable in a story like this, to evoke the windmills in Cervantes’s “Don Quixote.” “Quixote is a romantic and chivalrous knight who doesn’t want anything to change,” Mandelstam said. “He actually says that windmills are monsters with which he is going to do battle. That’s a delusion that he projects onto these windmills.” To combat these perceptions, Mandelstam hired a British consultant, RPS, that specializes in computerized models to show Delaware citizens exactly how the wind farm would look after its construction. Mandelstam says he thought these would help Delaware citizens to see offshore wind turbines as Sancho Panza, Quixote’s sidekick, saw them  not romantically but practically, as a new technology benefiting humanity. “I think it’s a very powerful literary example of a human phenomenon,” Mandelstam said. “When you see wind turbines rather than imagine them in your mind’s eye, then you perceive a new object in the landscape for what it is  rather than projecting upon it your own fear.” It helped, of course, that Bluewater’s turbines would be sited more than 12 miles out to sea, as opposed to the 5 to 7 miles for Cape Wind, so that, once constructed, the turbines would appear on the horizon no larger than half the size of a thumbnail, and then only on clear days.

“The Europeans see offshore wind turbines as sentinels,” Mandelstam told me, “protecting them from energy domination by foreign powers. When you put that against a few winter days of seeing turbines on the beach as you walk your dog, I think that’s a very easy trade-off.”

Mandelstam’s visual consultants showed the public what the turbines would look like when built. He hired consultants to address public concerns about the effects of wind turbines on migrating birds. He commissioned private meteorologists to verify the wind resource. And he and his team met regularly with the Delaware public to discuss the impact of the wind farm on ratepayers. “In one 21-day period, we spent $380,000 to do a geophysical investigation of the sea floor,” Mandelstam said. “On land, the same geophysical work would cost $5,000.” Four months and $5 million later, on Dec. 22, 2006, Mandelstam and his staff submitted the Bluewater Wind Park proposal, a 3,400-page document describing a 200-turbine, 600-megawatt, $1.5 billion offshore wind farm that would serve as a new electrical power plant.

Still, Bluewater was up against two energy Goliaths. NRG, a generation company with $5.9 billion in annual gross receipts, proposed building a coal-fired power plant; Conectiv, a subsidiary of Pepco Holdings, a Washington-based electric company with annual revenues of $8.3 billion, filed to build a natural-gas power plant. Conectiv’s sister company Delmarva Power immediately began to wage a negative advertising campaign. It used radio spots to try to turn people against wind energy, as did NRG, whose clean-coal plant was well represented by Mike Houghton, an NRG lobbyist and a major fund-raiser for Gov. Ruth Ann Minner. Six months before the bids were officially due, Governor Minner publicly endorsed NRG’s clean-coal proposal.

And yet, despite the long odds against Bluewater, Delaware’s citizens began swinging heavily in favor of the offshore wind project. They were receptive to Bluewater’s director of communications, Jim Lanard, who appeared weekly on a local talk show. “When I first invited Jim onto my show,” recalls the host, Randy Nelson, “nobody cared about wind power, but within five months, Jim would come on, and all the phone lines would light up.” According to Nelson, the Bluewater project captured the attention of a citizenry hungry for an alternative to coal-fired plants. “Out here, the Delaware shore is all we’ve got for an economy,” he says. “And the coal plant seemed to put the Delaware shore at risk. It’s hard to overstate just how much people hated that.” For his part, Mandelstam waged a low-budget campaign of town meetings throughout the state, emphasizing price stability  how Bluewater’s 25-year utility contract protected ratepayers from rising fossil-fuel prices. Mandelstam and his firm reinforced wind power’s environmental benefits and brought their visual simulation images to show how slight the change would be to the Delaware seascape. “They answered questions,” says R. Chris Clark, a Fenwick Island Council member. “They were the only ones doing town meetings.” People also responded to the economic benefits that the Bluewater project would bring to the state  hundreds of new union jobs, roughly $100 million in direct local union construction wages and spinoff industries. As a first-mover in offshore wind, Delaware was likely to become a development hub for a big build into the mid-Atlantic. The construction of the Bluewater Wind Park, moreover, would be part of an important step in decommissioning several old coal-fired power plants, the removal of which would, by some estimates, save the state $750 million in health-care costs.

Over time, comments to the Public Service Commission were nearly 10 to 1 in favor of the wind project. A survey conducted by the University of Delaware concluded that 91 percent of the state’s residents supported wind power offshore  even if it meant paying more per month for electricity. Soon Bluewater began picking up important endorsements. One of the first came from Jack Markell, the state treasurer and a current gubernatorial candidate. Dozens more followed, including a judicious opinion published by the state’s Audubon Society, but perhaps none were more important  or telling of the change in public opinion  than those from the half-dozen coastal tourist towns whose “viewshed” would be slightly but more or less permanently altered.

Then in May 2007, after the longest and most exhaustive review process in its history, the Public Service Commission unanimously selected the Bluewater Wind Park as the winner of the open competition and ordered Delmarva Power, the same company that had been actively campaigning against the wind farm, to begin negotiating a contract  what’s known in the business as a long-term power purchase agreement, or P.P.A., with Bluewater. The decision seemed nothing short of miraculous. “Two years ago,” Mandelstam told me shortly thereafter, “if I told the governor of Delaware that I was going to build a wind farm off the coast, she would have laughed in my face. Maybe it’s energy prices. Maybe it’s the Al Gore movie. But nobody’s laughing now.”