In less than a year, one of the windiest spots in southeastern Massachusetts will sprout a shiny new Vestas 660-kilowatt wind turbine that will provide nearly half the electricity needed to run the institution.
And the turbine will go up on the campus of Massachusetts Maritime Academy
without any of the heated controversy that has surrounded the much larger and
even more significant Cape Wind proposal for Nantucket Sound.
This particular turbine will be helping Massachusetts taxpayers directly as well
as future engineers in the emerging wind power industry.
Three years ago, Cape Wind offered $100,000 to Massachusetts Maritime Academy
and Cape Cod Community College to use to teach students about alternative
energy.
The leaders of Mass Maritime were intrigued with the idea, but they wanted
something more tangible.
They wanted a wind turbine for the campus.
It wasn't something that Cape Wind could provide, but the idea was born and it
wasn't going to go away.
Over the last three years, Commodore Richard G. Gurnon, the school president,
has ironed out a fantastic deal with the state Department of Capital Asset
Management and the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative to bring a $1.2
million Denmark-made wind turbine to the campus in April 2006. It will produce
electricity worth about $150,000-a-year for the campus that now spends more than
$300,000 on electric power.
But even more importantly, the turbine will be a classroom for engineering
students. More than 53 percent of the 950 students at Mass Maritime major in
engineering. In the past, these students have trained for and worked in the
fossil-fuel energy industry with a few working at nuclear power plants. The
turbine will give the school a powerful way of training students in wind power
and other forms of alternative energy.
Commodore Gurnon explains that when the turbine produces more energy than is
needed on campus, the excess energy will be used to split water into hydrogen
and oxygen. The oxygen will be sold to medical products companies and the
hydrogen will be stored in fuel cells to power vehicles on campus.
It will be yet another way for the creative faculty and students of this state
institution to train for the alternative energy field.
"Philosophically, I believe fossil fuels will always be with us, but the future
ought to be renewable energy," said Commodore Gurnon.
Mass Maritime certainly knows the downside of fossil fuels.
The campus sits a short distance from the Mirant power plant in Sandwich, one of
the state's "filthy five" electric plants. The school is also at the northern
end of Buzzards Bay, a body of water that has been battered over the years by
major oil spills, the latest in April 2003 when a Bouchard Transportation Co.
barge leaked about 100,000 gallons of oil into the bay, killing birds and
damaging more than 90 miles of coastline.
The wind turbine will help this small, but impressive public school become a
national leader in training students to work in the wind and alternative energy
fields. We applaud the Yankee ingenuity of the school's leaders.
"We kept saying, I wish there was something we could do beside curse the wind,"
said Commodore Gurnon. Now the school and the taxpayers will be cheering the
wind on, knowing it's saving tax dollars and fueling education. This story appeared on Page A12 of The Standard-Times on June 24, 2005.