Assembling a test tower

The wind crew, for its swansong this summer, is assembling an anemometer test tower and satellite weather station on campus.

We're using components salvaged from a Bergey 10KW turbine last year from a site in Newport, Maine. The original turbine was another example of a poorly sited household turbine -- there are hundreds of these now in Maine, mostly Skystreams, but some Bergeys.

Unscrupulous contractors sell the turbines to householders without reference to any anemometry, and when the turbine fails to produce even a small fraction of the power advertised, the householder is left with an expensive white elephant.

The expenses persist even if the turbine is not being worn out by power production. There's still the problem of regular servicing. A Bergey 10KW turbine is not by any means a "plug-and-play" device, and contractors may charge several thousand dollars just to lower it to the ground for servicing.

Unity College received this particular turbine as a tax-deductible gift as long as the wind crew would remove it from the site, which gave the owner some compensation, and it gave us some turbine and tower parts for future use.

After some cogitation and reflection and a few phone calls to Bergey, we decided to give the turbine parts themselves to MOFGA for use as repair parts for their identical 10KW Bergey.

We won permission from the college administration and Efficiency Maine Trust to use the tower for anemometrical testing and weather station purposes. In a separate gift, also last year, we had received a satellite-operable anemometry system made by NRG Systems, Inc, whose equipment we generally use for our Maine state wind survey. If we married the tower with the satellite system, we would have a weather station whose data could be viewed real-time in the classroom.

So much for the theory.

Putting up anemometer and wind turbine tower systems is partly a problem for theory, but mostly it's a problem of cold steel and warm muscle.

Yesterday I enjoyed myself puttering quietly on the tower. The wind crew, who made the foundation for the system, is having a couple of week's vacation, so I worked alone.

It was pleasant to be out there in the field putting the tower parts together.

Very Zen.