A judge has given the final OK for Vermont to build its second major wind farm, near the Connecticut River in the Northeast Kingdom. (I love writing “Northeast Kingdom” - it’s a better nickname even than “North of the Notches”.) Read the Free-Press story here.
Maine remains the region’s wind-power leader of course, with three major [...]

(ADDENDUM: Announcement for combined heat-and-power biomass plant in Berlin - see story here - raises some questions about the North Country grid, too, as the first comment notes.)
(ANOTHER ADDENDUM: Turbines aren’t fallible, either: Saco, Maine is suing the manufacturer of a turbine that proved a dud, then broke. Story is here.)
It’s always been clear that [...]

A public hearing with “more than 100″ people about a proposed 100-megawatt wind farm on the Fletcher and Tenney mountain ridges produced the usual concerns and support, according to this story in the Concord Monitor which has these quotes:

“I have no problem with going green - I’ve seen what oil does to the ground. [...]

Maine regulators have given Central Maine Power the go-ahead for a $1.4 billion, five-year expansion of the power grid in that state, designed partly to bring power from wind farms to populated areas and also keep the grid “stable” as alternative energy ramps up - meaning, I think, increasing the ability to shift power from [...]

Boston.com, the online face of the Boston Globe, says that the Interior secretary will, about an hour from now, give  the thumbs up to Cape Wind off Cape Cod, launching the nation’s first offshore wind farm and probably setting the stage for a bunch of multi-hundred-megawatt turbines a few miles offshore up and down the [...]

Iberdrola, the Spanish wind-power giant that owns and operates New Hampshire’s only wind farm (Lempster Mountain) , is proposing a 48-megawatt farm, with 24 turbines, in the North County. Here’s the Union-Leader story.

The Portland Press-Herald has a story about a wave-energy development company that wants to do testing at some of the sites off Maine which have been designated as test sites for offshore wind power. Read the story here. This is all very preliminary, as is most wave-energy work - a field that, in the U.S. [...]

Excellent story in the Portland Press-Herald (read it here) about the noise effect of utility-scale (1.5 megawatt) wind turbines, which have turned some pro-wind folks on Vinalhaven Island into doubters. (Note: For more details about sound from windmills, see Earle Rich’s comment after the article.) From the story:
Workers will make small modifications to the equipment [...]

Tux Turkel of the Portland Press-Herald, who has (a) the second-best byline in New England* and (b) a long history of reporting intelligently about alternative energy in Maine, writes a good piece in the Sunday paper about one town’s decision to place restrictive zoning on wind power after a few turbines had gone up. This [...]

The 99-megawatt ridgeline wind farm heading for Dixville Notch in Coos County is probably going to be the last big wind farm in New Hampshire for a while (assuming it gets final federal approval, which it probably will), since it uses up the spare grid connection to the North Country, which is where all our [...]

The 99-megawatt wind farm proposed for a long ridgeline north of Berlin has gotten approval from the state, reports in the Concord Monitor. Clearing could begin this fall and construction next spring. It will be roughly four times the size of Lempster Mountain Wind (shown above), the state’s only wind farm, and will have annual power output roughly equivalent to two of the hydropower dams on the Merrimack River.

It will also pretty much use up all the spare capacity in the power grid North of the Notches, making it tougher for biomass power plants to get future approval. However, as New Hampshire Business Review reports, the proposal to bring a massive, 1,200-MW line down through the state to carry HydroQuebec power, may solve that problem.

Those of you ignorant enough not to regularly read my column in the Telegraph (for shame, for shame!) may be interested in this week’s item, an update on New Hampshire’s first wind farm, Lempster Mountain, which is up and running at full blast. The column is here. It gives me an excuse to rerun this wonderful photo from last fall.

The latest attempt to build a wind farm in New Hampshire, a 99-megawatt proposal sprawling across a long ridgeline in Coos County, has plenty of fans and plenty of haters, as this Union-Leader story about the final public hearing makes clear. It’s a boon to a poor region or a boondoggle for the environment, depending [...]

The local community, the Appalachian Mountain Club, biomass generators (who also want access to the power grid) - there’s a long list of people who have signed up as officially interested parties in the proposal to build a big wind farm around Dixville Notch, as the Union-Leader reports. Depending on your point of view, this [...]

I got a look at the Lempster Mountain wind farm this week - we did a fly-over on Monday for aerial photos, as you can see, and took a visit Tuesday - although we weren’t allowed up the mountain to the turbines themselves. Here’s my story. The 12-turbine, 24 MW (which, with an efficiency of around 37 percent, is roughly equivalent to a 9 MW oil-fired plant) wind farm should be running before Christmas