A pair of new grants totaling more than $228,000 will support educational and job training at Adult and Continuing Education of Martha's Vineyard.
Wind turbines get all the negative ink. Noise, vibration, flicker, interruption of beloved views. Big troublemakers, aren’t they?
Solar panels, on the other hand, are considered to be quite benign. The Nantucket Historic District Commission doesn’t like them much, and some people would rather see roofs without them, but by and large they have come to be widely accepted.
But what about when we scale them up with considerably larger installations that can make a meaningful contribution to our energy supply? Are they really so benign?
T here are many bird-watchers on the Vineyard. They come from all walks of life from architects to zookeepers. Some are liberals, some conservatives and maybe some are even Tea Party members. They have different ideas on what the definitions of conservation, ecology and green living are. The issue of turbines for the generation of electricity has caused some discomfort among the ranks.
Vineyarders Jonathan and Linda M. Haar work in wind power technology, but one thing they share with wind energy opponents is an objection to seeing enormous towers built in pristine places.
And their concern is not just aesthetic, but practical. It would, they reasoned, make much more sense to generate the power as close as possible to where the power is used.
Hence their innovative new turbine, tested for the first time at the Martha’s Vineyard Airport this week: a turbine standing just 20 feet tall, intended to be mounted on city buildings.
On Sunday night opponents of wind development off Vineyard shores — including selectmen, fishermen, Wampanoags and a Republican candidate for Massachusetts governor — were given a megaphone to voice their views.
Hosted by POINT (Protect Our Islands Now for Tomorrow), a group led by Andrew Goldman of Chilmark, the forum drew a large crowd to the Chilmark Community Center.
“We will have the largest concentration of turbines anywhere in the world,” declared Mr. Goldman, who moderated the forum.
It’s a precarious time in the energy story of the Vineyard. Massive offshore turbine development seems all but inevitable and yet no shovels have broken the seabed. And this Sunday a group from the Vineyard and Beacon Hill want to talk about it all, at a forum titled The Island’s Future Blowin, in the Wind.
In the coming year the Vineyard and Gosnold communities will be deciding what kind of wind energy development we want, both on land and offshore in state and federal waters. We’d like to give the community an update on preparation of a Wind Energy Plan for Dukes County, an effort begun early this year by the Martha’s Vineyard Commission with the help of a work group made up of representatives of the seven towns of the county.
