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. [...]

A few weeks ago Earle Rich noted that a New Hampshire man had gotten a patent on a small wind turbine inspired by a Nikloa Tesla patent (which was for steam- or water-powered turbines). Recently he and I went out and saw it in person - here is my story in today’s Telegraph.
The one line [...]

Earle Rich and I are heading down to Greenville, NH, this morning to take a look at a unique wind turbine design recently patented by a local man. It has gotten a bit of press, and Earle wrote about it earlier this month. It will be the topic of a story/column in the next week [...]

It’s tough to judge the reality of new inventions from news stories - reporters are usually liberal-arts majors, not engineers - so stories like this one in the Burlington Free-Press need to be taken with a grain of salt. It says that a tiny company in Willston, Vt. has patented a new time of wind [...]

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 [...]

ADDENDUM: Britain’s Royal Academy of Engineering says in a report that small-scale, rooftop wind turbines are virtually always a waste of time, accomplishing little. Story here. It includes this potent quote: “The things that save the money are not done, because they are not sexy.”

There’s something about designing wind turbines that brings out the Alexander [...]

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 [...]

A couple of Maine towns that installed wind turbines early have been disappointed with the results, and are on the financial hook now that the installer has declared bankruptcy, reports the Portland Press-Herald. First-mover advantage isn’t always an advantage.
Speaking of disappointment, it’s too bad that an article this well done confused kilowatts and kilowatt-hours, as [...]

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 weirdly named Vinalhaven (not “vinyl-haven” so don’t go there looking for LPs) is the largest of Maine’s year-round islands. As the Portland Press-Herald reports, it is installing three 1.5-MW wind turbines that it expects will lower electric rates 20 percent, because they’ll sell excess power into the grid. This has helped the project get [...]

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.

(FOLLOW-UP, sort of: Here’s a good Cnet story about massive wind turbines, and how they allow the use of places with slower winds.)
Steven Chu, the Nobel laureate/energy secretary, is visiting Massachusetts today (the Globe reports) to announce $25 million in stimulus funding for a massive R&D operation to develop huge wind-turbine blades in the Charleston [...]

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.

SORT-OF-RELATED ITEM: Here’s a story about hearings of health concerns from people living near the Mars Hill wind farm in Maine, due (it seems) to audible and low-frequency noise disrupting sleep and/or causing other stress.

Researchers say turning off wind farms in low winds would greatly reduce the number of bats killed by the spinning blades, [...]

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 [...]