Deer Isle explores hosting wind farm Local firm to gauge island’s gust speeds

DEER ISLE – A local company has joined with a Maryland-based energy business to investigate the potential for a small commercial wind farm on the island.

Coastal Green Energy recently was awarded a $9,475 matching grant from the Maine Technology Institute to install an anemometer, or wind gauge, on land it owns in town in order to study wind speeds in the region. Ricky Spofford of Deer Isle is a partner in the company that has been informally studying wind speeds in the area.

The characteristics of Penobscot Bay appear to be ideal for wind generation, Spofford said Monday.

“We’re getting good wind,” he said.

He anticipates the winds will be sufficient to allow the company to establish a small wind farm on the 33.5-acre site the company owns.

The grant will allow the company to work with Switch LLC to set up high-tech equipment to get more precise readings on wind speeds in the area, he said. The anemometer is already on its way to Deer Isle and should be operating within a month, according to Kyle Teamey, Switch vice president for product development.

“We’ll put the anemometer system in place to see if the wind resources there matche what we think is there,” Teamey said. “That’s going to take about one year, more or less, depending on the characteristics.”

They are looking for sustained winds with a high average speed, Teamey said Monday. The more “up time” a wind farm can have, the more economically feasible it is and the higher the winds go, the more power the turbine will produce.

“The Atlantic Coast generally meets that criteria,” he said. “Most of the sustained winds are off shore. Deer Isle provides an advantage in that we don’t have to build offshore. On the island we seem to be getting the winds we usually see offshore.”

Although Spofford indicated that the company was looking at the possibility of a five-turbine wind farm for the site, Teamey said the anemometer study will determine the exact makeup of the planned facility.

“It’s way too early,” he said. “The study will determine what kind of turbine and how large they need to be. There are a lot of factors to be considered.”

The anemometer will sit atop a 262-foot tower and will be unobtrusive, according to Spofford. If constructed, the turbines will be located about 1,600 feet from the shore and would not be visible except from the air.

Teamey added that one of the goals of the company is to develop a wind turbine site with as little environmental and community impact as possible.

If the project is developed, the plan will be to sell the power into the Maine power grid.

This is the second wind power effort to begin in Deer Isle. Competitive Energy Services of Portland in November set up an anemometer to study the potential for commercial wind power on a 78-acre, privately owned site in North Deer Isle. That study also was expected to last about one year.