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. [...]

Offshore wind farms in the Northeast make a lot of engineering sense: that’s where the continent’s best winds are, it’s close to lots of electricity-consuming people, and the broad continental shelf makes construction comparatively cheap compared to the west coast. But paying for electricity generation is complicated.
The current system of calculating rates of return and [...]

What if Maine could tap its boatbuilding and composites expertise to build strong, lightweight components to float in the Gulf of Maine? (Floating wind turbines) could power the Northeast, and be far enough offshore to dampen opposition from coastal residents.
That’s a quote to ponder from a story in the Portland Press-Herald from tech [...]

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.

Portland Press-Herald’s Tux Turkel has a story in the Sunday paper (read it here) about a test program on a couple of Maine islands to store excess energy from wind turbines in ceramic bricks, then release it as heat when needed.

Basically, when the turbines are producing more power than the island needs, rather than sell [...]

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 [...]

(An update: A Maine contractor is about to erect his 100th wind-power windmill!)
Maine is by far the region’s leader in terrestrial wind farms, and they want to be the leader in offshore wind, too. A state task force has announced (read the short story here) three sites where it can run more tests, to determine [...]

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 Portland Press-Herald has a story (read it here) about Vinalhaven island, not too far from Acadia National Park, and how it has built two wind turbines totaling 1.5 megawatts that provide all its electricity, plus a surplus which is sold to the grid. It’s a good, comprehensive story - the sort of thing that [...]

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 [...]

There are legitimate concerns about wind farms (cost effectiveness, best way to reduce bat mortality), but there are also some really goofy ones - like the fear that they will suck so much energy out of the atmosphere that they’ll alter weather, or even the rotation of the Earth!
But here’s a concern about a really [...]