Healey is keen to promote wind projects in the Northeast

Good thing Gov. Maura Healey didn’t take her fellow New England governors and visiting Canadian prime ministers on a boat tour of the wind farms on Cape Cod.

Given the way the turbine blades shattered and scattered debris across the islands, her guests probably had to don helmets and bulletproof vests to protect themselves.

The danger is in the Vineyard Wind 1 project area south of Nantucket, where a turbine blade that broke sent fiberglass fragments, debris and other debris ashore.

Eastern Canadian premiers and governors visited Boston earlier this week to attend their annual conference, hosted this time by Healey.

So it’s a good thing the Vineyard Wind Farm has suspended power production until the investigation into the broken blade is complete.

Massachusetts does not currently derive its power from offshore wind farms anyway.

But the incident did not deter Healey — so to speak — from his mission to make Massachusetts into an ecological wonderland of sorts.

“In short, we are operating at scale,” Healey said, announcing on the eve of the conference that Massachusetts had secured the largest offshore wind contract in state history.

The wind power, which will generate 2,678 megawatts of electricity, is to be sourced from three wind projects: South Coast Wind, New England Wind 1 and Vineyard Wind 2.

Healey said, “We will power 1.4 million Massachusetts homes with clean, renewable energy, create thousands of good, union jobs and generate billions of dollars in economic activity.”It will also reduce the state’s carbon emissions by the equivalent of taking a million gasoline-powered cars off the road, she added.

“The world will look to New England for its clean energy future,” Healey said.

In addition, according to Healey’s colleague Elizabeth Mahoney, commissioner of the Department of Energy Resources, the three projects must, of course, “provide opportunities for diversity, equity and inclusion.” Which is predictable in a progressive administration.

However, in a plea for clarity, the governor, who is supporting Kamala Harris, would do well to clarify to people that she is talking about megawatts, not MAGAwatts.

It would also be helpful to explain what a megawatt is, since we supposedly have so many of them.

Listening to Healey talk about megawatts, though, is like listening to someone reading you your National Grid electricity bill, if you can stand it. That’s where the electric vehicle bills come in. The distributed solar fees, the energy efficiency fees, the renewable energy fees, and other weird stuff.

She was able to explain that a megawatt “is a unit of power equal to one million watts.” The name comes from the 18th-century Scottish inventor James Watt (1736–1819), who invented the steam engine.

But what is a watt? Well, she might say, “A watt is a unit of power equal to one joule per second.”

What is a joule? A joule is a unit of energy “equal to the amount of work done when a force of one newton displaces a mass through a distance of one metre in the direction of the force.” It is named after the 18th-century physicist James Prescott Joule (1818–1889).

Okay, but what is a newton? The newton, named after the English mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton (1643–1727), “is the force which gives a mass of one kilogram an acceleration of one meter per second squared.”

Now that you understand this, and the whole discussion about megawatts, watts, joules, and newtons has been cleared up, it’s time to get the wind blowing and the megawatts flowing.

You don’t have to be a politician to know which way the wind is blowing, but it helps.

But megawatts aside, Healey has to be careful not to be blown away by the wind, as happened to the broken blades of a wind turbine at the Cape.

As the old saying goes, happiness comes as the wind blows.

Peter Lucas is a seasoned political reporter. Contact him at [email protected]