There was a snag and it was a big one. We have 21st-century technology to produce the power, but we still have a 20th-century power grid that can’t move it from the windy and sunny parts of the country to the urban markets. The American power grid isn’t set up for it. It’s old-fashioned and parochial when it needs to be continental and forward-looking. It’s like the nation’s roads before President Dwight D. Eisenhower championed the construction of the Interstate Highway System seven decades ago.

Skelly was regularly visiting TVA’s headquarters and received a warm reception from the TVA head. Negotiations seemed to be going well. But the TVA was getting a decidedly different message from Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Republican who had a longstanding dislike for wind turbines. He had bought a vacation property on Nantucket Island, off the Massachusetts coast, in 2001. The week he closed on the property, news broke about Cape Wind, a plan to build 170 wind turbines in the middle of Nantucket Sound. A year later, after being elected to the U.S. Senate, he introduced a bill that would make life difficult for offshore wind developers. Over the next few years, he kept up his campaign against them.