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 [...]

Those big, 1.5-megawatt wind turbines are becoming - well, if not commonplace, at least less rare. Placing a single turbine isn’t really news any more. Except in Portsmouth, R.I., I think, where one has just been erected next to the high school. The interesting thing is that the $2.92 million deal was paid for by the town, which will be using most of the power itself. It will provide about two-thirds of the annual electricity for municipal buildings, at a savings of “over $100,000″ a year.

It’s not easy to figure out whether there’s enough wind in a location to power a turbine, particularly in urban areas where buildings make air currents go every which way. A study of “microwind” in and around Boston has emphasized this fact, reports CNet news:
The Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust was “taken aback” at the discrepancy [...]

Speaking of drawn-out battles over large wind farms (see previous post about Cape Wind), the Union-Leader notes that a number of towns have proposed ordinances on the books about zoning rules for small wind towers, set to be debated during town meeting season. It makes a good comparison to the cell-tower debate in the ’90s. [...]