New Hampshire's first commercial scale wind farm is dedicated

Good thing Teddy the bufoon Kennedy doesn't have property near by or this wind farm would still be on the drawing board. "I empathize with you' : Teddy Kennedy Do as I say not as I do: Teddy Kennedy. Going green should be a real commitment not just a campaign slogan!

It's interesting that here in New England we like to think of ourselves as being very green conscious and yet there are literally THOUSANDS of commercial wind turbines deployed in the mid-west and California. There are several wind farms out there that individually have more turbines than all of those deployed in New England combined.

Granted the midwest is much more suitable in terms of available wind and land for deployment, but it's just kind of funny that these articles suggest some sort of big deal when these minor little wind projects come online here.

glad to see it online and reducing oil dependecy. I hope it is the spearhead for New hampshire and Maine to lead New England in renewable energy since the other states are choking projects with reviews. If California with its strigent environmentalism allows for major wind parks then there should be wind projects along our coastline as well on the harbor islands.

Nice job Uncle Kevin. (property owner)...way to be a forward thinker.

A car traveling down the road at 40-50mph is louder than a 1.5mw wind turbine, and the bird issue is, well.............Check out the Fenner Park wind farm interview on youtube. The land owner says he's had 4 or 5 turbines on his property for almost 9 years now and he's not seen one dead bird yet. Expect disinformation campaigns when a technology starts to make headway into the fossil fuel monopolies. These campaigns have successfully kept much more interesting technologies than wind and solar off the market for at least 50 years, and the time for those technologies to come out is right now as we speak.

1. How much does a turbine cost?
2. What is the cost of the infra-structure?
new access roads, new grid, ongoing maintenance.
2. How much power does 1 turbine produce, REALLY?(see #1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
3. How long does a turbine last?
4. What effect do bugs have on turbines?
5. What effect does ice have on turbines?
6. Do turbines consume electric when the wind speed is marginally low?

Sorry, forgot . . .
What does the government pay the land owner for each turbine?
I've read $6000 per year.

To answer a few questions in the comments so far:

I believe the land-use contracts are negotiated individually. I talked with a land owner who had 6 turbines from the Hyde County wind farm in centreal South Dakota on his property and he said he was getting $3700 / year per turbine.

IMO the noise issue is a non-factor. I've stood within about 100 yards of one of the big GE turbines in the Colorado Green Enery project near Lamar and could barely hear anything.

The two prominant commercial turbines in the US right now are GE's 1.5 MW turbine and to a lesser extent Siemens 2.3 MW turbine.

Per above, noise isn't really the issue with wind energy, currently it's the immense amount of space / MW compared to other energy sources. For example, the Horse Hollow Wind Farm in Texas is the largest wind farm in the world, with 421 turbines producing 735.5 MW. The wind farm takes up 47,000 acres of land, or 190 square kilometers.

To compare that locally, the old Salem Harbor coal-fired plant produces 750 MW of power with a footprint of maybe 1% of the wind farm. But of course it emits pollution. Tradeoffs abound as with all power sources.

I would just like to add some information to the comment by Rphamel:

The information published by the wind farm proponents is often skewed drastically to make wind power look more reasonable than it actually is. On the Department of Energy website there is a list of net electrical power produced by every power generator in the country. For 2008 the Horse Hollow Wind Farm produced an average of 231.4 MW vs 735.5 MW advertised. This comes to 31.4% efficiency. Some windfarms in the country are a little better than this and many are considerably worse. Typically you will find the "nameplate" rating not actual.

Tom,

Your point is well taken, though it is also true that most fossil fuel power generation facilities have to "derate" themselves because they can't meet their opacity standards or for other parasitic reasons. I recently visited a coal fired power plant in Indiana that was derating by about 25% of their nominal capacity.

But, the problem no doubt is of scale. Wind energy provides something like 2% of all power in the US and yet if you drive through the midwest you'll see turbines all over the place. There is a such thing as visual pollution as well as air pollution. Personally the sight of them doesn't bother me, but to each their own.

I see the biggest problem at this time to be scale. As noted above, in the best case it takes the world's largest wind farm to match the nameplace of a medium / small sized coal plant. Considering that we don't have enough energy right now to meet needs, let alone replace the fuels that people find less desirable, wind power (and solar, which has similar area per MW problems) is a long way from becoming more than a supplemental source of electricity in the US.

Awesome news! Surely, the open space under wind farms can be used for agriculture. As for aesthetics, I'd much rather live or vacation near wind turbines than a smokestack any day.

Although there are efficiency limitations and spacial concerns, is it not important to foster these methods of energy generation that do not have destructive, long term negative impact on our environment? I was on a motorcycle ride up Route 10 back in September - I live in Leominster, MA - and was absolutely thrilled to see the turbines on the ridge. I look forward to seeing more in my New England travels.

The American Dream lives on...Investing in todays jobs for CONTROLED electric cost of the future is a "no brainer" You will always have people standing in your way . I myself marvel at the site of these structures of beauty and knowing that we are producing electricity free from wind .