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Posted on November 25, 2006 | Category: Architecture, Picture of the Day
This is a pictrue of the Vestas V-47 windmill at Portsmouth Abbey. This monstrous windmill stands 164 feet tall. The School itself is owned and operated by 16 Benedictine monks, who work in both the administration and the classroom. The windmill supplies about 40% of the power used by the school just under 1 million kWh per year and should pay for it’s $1.25 million price tag within just 5 to 7 years.
Oh ye winds!
Editorial by Bruce Burdett
‘Oh ye ice and snow,’ reads the sign at one end of the Portsmouth Abbey hockey rink. Perhaps now the school should add “wind” to that old blessing. Not content to merely bemoan the brutal cost of electricity and oil, the school is looking to the wind for help. It hopes to erect a wind turbine on high ground at its waterfront campus. That turbine could reduce by half the school’s $200,000 annual electric bill. It should also cut into heating costs a bit.
Like wind power advocates in Westport (about whose search he had read), the Abbey’s Brother Joseph Bryon was inspired in part by the example of Hull, Mass. The coastal town just north of Boston erected a wind turbine out on Windmill Point. Since then, the three spinning blades have churned out over $500 worth of electricity a day on average, enough to power all the town’s street lights, stoplights and then some.
Brother Joseph takes his pitch to Portsmouth’s Zoning Board of Review next Thursday where we hope the request for considerable height variance (the turbine would stand 164 feet tall) is greeted warmly. He is well aware that wind turbines can stir controversy. In Hull, naysayers (most of them neighbors) predicted that Hull would rue the day it ever contemplated a wind turbine. It would be ugly and loud, they said, would kill birds and would mess up TV reception. They warned that it would break down and would certainly never make a dime. Wrong on all counts (although beauty is in the eye of the beholder). As a Westport delegation learned, the thing is quiet, reliable, has no record of bird kills and there have been no TV reception complaints.
It would indeed be tall, but there is a certain beauty in a machine that captures a resource we enjoy in abundance and harnesses that energy to reduce dependence on the likes of OPEC or Brayton Point’s coal fumes.
May the Abbey be blessed with an accommodating zoning board and neighbors, fair winds and abundant imitators.
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