This past Friday the Vineyard Gazette detailed the plans of Vineyard Power, the Island’s first energy cooperative, where predevelopment financing of $17 million is underway, and a “feverish scramble for members” (today’s $50 cost becomes almost 20 times that in four years) promises that those who’ve signed on by August will have input into where the turbines will be located.

If you’re tempted by the hard sell, please look into what you would empower before writing your check. If you’re bewildered by the local wind power frenzy, now is the time to become informed and to ask that your elected representatives on the Martha’s Vineyard Commission and town boards do the same, with diligent objectivity.

The Vineyard is fortunate to be asking the hard questions just as data has become widely accessible to inform wise renewable energy choices. Vineyard Power emerged from the Vineyard Energy Project, formed in 2003 to educate the public, but ironically, the education component has dropped away to the point that the power brokers themselves appear deaf to the recent accumulation of evidence which undercuts the wisdom of wind power and its vapid boasts of a “positive impact on air quality.”

Richard Andre, new president and former director of Vineyard Power, “. . . knows how to manage a company and earned his stripes in the energy sector.” He cites Vinalhaven, Me., where an island energy cooperative’s three 400-foot wind turbines went online in November.

If you do nothing else, go to saveourseashore.org and read Hard Lessons from the Fox Islands Wind Project by Sally Wylie. Celebration and excitement surrounding the project turned to “disbelief and shock . . . as the turbines revved up and up . . . to levels unimagined. It wasn’t supposed to be this way!”

“We were so gullible, so stupid,” Sally told me. “You still have a chance. Good luck.”

Mr. Andre has rather “been in touch with George Baker,” chief executive officer of Vinalhaven’s Fox Island Winds LLC, who initially said the company was prepared to address the unexpected noise and consequent health risks. When research found that cutting the output from 45 decibels (the state standard) to 42 decibels would cut sound volume in half but add 20 per cent to the cost, Mr. Baker asked, “Do we want to set rules that make it impossible to do something that’s really good for a community because 10 per cent of the people are bothered by it?”

Since the turbines went online, the Vinalhaven community “has researched the impact of low-frequency noise, scoured the island with sound meters and determined that the turbine sound travels over more than a mile, developed wind speed and noise level data sheets which are analyzed by sound technicians in Boston,” according to one news report.

This week a newly-formed citizen task force on wind power asked for a temporary moratorium on new wind projects while the Maine legislature considers amending current noise standards to include the turbines’ particularly harmful low-frequency noise. WLBZ news reported that “the request is unlikely to go far with the governor, who is a huge supporter of wind power and feels, as the wind industry does, that science is on their side.”

“They’re coming forward with a couple of small examples put forward by opinion, and it hasn’t been measured, and it hasn’t been scientifically approved by anybody,” he said. “And we’re using scientific models.” Full speed ahead.

A Maine resident responded: “We have no say about the wind turbines coming to our community . . . children with certain conditions are deeply disturbed by the noise/vibrations they produce. I have one of those children.” We have those children here too.

Anyone with access to a computer really should go to windturbinesyndrome.com for a look at a one-page summary of related health concerns, detailed in the critically acclaimed, recently released book of the same title.

See Sustainable Energy ­— Without the Hot Air by David MacKay to learn about the relative inefficiency of wind energy (two to three units per area consumed versus PV panels’ five to 20 units, hydroelectric’s 11 units). Consider the alternatives of wave action and tidal flow generation, and deep water floating wind turbines which should be operational by 2013.

Hopefully we’ll keep the wind power debate civil and informed. Look into wind-watch.org, windaction.org, acousticecology.org, howcloseistooclose.com. Then if you run into the commenter who opined last week that your “objections range from the idiotic all the way to the absurd,” ask him what he’s been reading.

Helen Schwiesow Parker is a licensed clinical psychologist who lives in Chilmark.