The next day dawned nice and clear, so I called a number of charter boat captains about “driving out to the windmills,” as one of them put it. The response of Chris Hobe of “Fish the World Charters” was typical: Small craft warnings were still out, and one should not be fooled by a bit of blue sky. Even when it’s passable on Block, conditions can be extreme on the open water.

So instead of visiting windmills, I interviewed Jessica Willi, executive director of the Block Island Tourism Council, located at the town airport. Block Island State Airport pulls in a fair number of people with serious wealth, as evidenced by the expensive small planes parked on the tarmac and the magazines in the airport lounge with titles like Elite Traveler: The Private Jet Lifestyle Magazine, which carried stories on superyachts and $249,000 watches.

After minor pleasantries, Willi tells me of a University of Rhode Island study of Block’s wind farm, funded by the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, scheduled to come out in a few months. The study is composed of several smaller studies, including a three-year sampling of public opinion by cultural anthropologist Amelia Moore on approval or disapproval of the wind farm, and whether it went up or down over time. (Answer: up.) Moore’s study began when the turbines were just being put in; now that several full tourist seasons have gone by, results were starting to come in about the effect on the “viewshed.” In Willi’s opinion, such a meta-study—which included a look at the wind farm’s effects on tourism—is great: “When a company is talking about coming in and building a wind farm offshore, and the powers-that-be say ‘not in my backyard because it’s going to affect tourism,’ they can show the study ... and the end result, if anything, [showed] it probably improved tourism.”

Willi says that there are definitely people who come to Block Island just to see the wind farm, but adds: “It’s probably less than 100 people that come specifically to see it. And we have 1.3 million visitors a year, so it’s not like a huge percentage of people, it’s not making or breaking the economy... 99.5 percent of people tell us it’s not affecting their visit to Block Island. So it’s probably a net wash.”

From her point of view, even such a neutral outcome is a relief; tourism revenues provide much of the money the town needs for roads, schools, health care, emergency services, the town library, and just about everything else. Whether it’s day-trippers or full-time summer cottage people, it’s those 1.3 million yearly tourists to Block Island who pay the taxes that support the community, not the tax revenue from the island’s thousand or so year-round residents. An increasing number of those tourists have been coming from the wealthiest one-percent of the population—so there were legitimate worries about what they would think of a wind farm in the viewshed.

In at least one case, the value of a home facing the offshore windmills went up, not down. “I’ve actually had people say that they’ve been given offers on their house because they have views of the wind farm,” said Willi. “But I think that’s somebody trying to prove a point. Because there’s like two neighbors out there, and one’s super pro-wind, and one’s like the most anti-Block Island wind farm. And they are neighbors, and so I think they’re trying to prove a point to each other.” She added: “But the great thing [about the coming of the wind farm] is that it’s stable energy.”

Her assertion, of course, goes against the primary criticism of renewables. But the electricity situation here is complex: If Block Island had been able to simply pay the estimated $25-to-$40 million on its own for a 22-mile-long submerged power cable buried 6 feet under the ocean floor from the nearest substation on the mainland—without the wind farm, just having the regional electric company known as National Grid provide the electricity from the mainland—islanders would have also seen the arrival of stable power. But the island had petitioned for such a cable for decades, without any luck, and there was no way they could have paid for it on their own. Better to let the wind farm do it.

Still, Willi is an islander and eventually talked about the wind farm from that point of view, rather than as someone concerned about tourism numbers and how to compete with Martha’s Vineyard or the Hamptons. “What was lost by the advent of the windmills is sort of very intangible,” Willi says. “There was something about going to the Southeast Lighthouse or standing on the bluffs, with a view of nothing but the sea and the stars. It’s really hard to describe, it’s a feeling you really only have if you’ve lived on Block Island for many, many years, and you’ve been to that spot a hundred times. You go up there and look out at the ocean for whatever reason, and you get clarity or peace of mind. And now when you go do that, there’s something industrial there. And sad to say, they’re not beautiful—at least, not to me.

“And whatever you think about them, the reality is they’re there now, and they weren’t there before.”