ORLAND – The winds of change will be blowing through town soon.

One of the first commercial windmills in the area has been erected at the G.M. Allen & Sons blueberry factory. Once all the connections are completed and the system has been tested, the turbine will generate about one-fifth of the power needed to operate the plant each year.

The 100-foot tower has been lying horizontal at the site on Route 15 for several months awaiting the arrival of the turbine and some wiring. When the items arrived, workers then had to wait for the weather to cooperate.

“We got the turbine and were waiting for the wire to come,” said Harley Lee, president of Endless Energy Corp. of Yarmouth, which is installing the system under a contract with the U.S. Department of Energy. “Then we needed a good weather window.”

That window came Tuesday when, after the severe winds of Sunday and Monday, there was a period of calm. A boom truck was available and the crews set up the tower and hoisted the large turbine into place with its three, 25-foot blades.

The good weather didn’t last long, and a crew from Haskell Electric in Blue Hill worked with engineer Mark Young in Wednesday’s freezing rain to install the electrical components and to make the connections to the blueberry plant. It will take a few more days to complete the connections and upload the necessary software for the system.

Lee said he anticipated the turbine would be turning and generating power within the next week or so, but also said he expected there will be intermittent shutdowns until the system is fine-tuned.

Tom Taylor-Lash, who lives across the road from the site, will serve as the company’s resident windsmith. He’s already been to the top of the tower, helping to install the turbine, and expects to climb the tower occasionally in the future.

Because the federal contract provides most of the funding for the pilot project, Lee said his company also will install additional monitoring equipment at the Orland site and will provide data on its operation to the U.S. Department of Energy. The turbine is rated to last for 30 years.

The spot was chosen as a test site for commercial wind generation, partly because of the location and partly because of the blueberry plant’s high power usage.

“The site is very good,” Lee said on Wednesday. “The views are beautiful and we like to have those open views. It’s good for wind.”

Maine ranks in the top 20 states in its potential for wind power, and has the potential to generate as much as 56 billion kilowatt hours annually, according to a 1991 study by Pacific Northwest Laboratories. Lee said the Orland turbine will generate about 80,000 kilowatt hours annually, or the equivalent electricity used by about 12 Central Maine Power Co. residential customers. That’s estimated to be about one-fifth of the Allen plant’s needs each year.

Although the “good wind” at the Orland site has made it attractive for this type of alternative energy system, the installation might not have been feasible if not for Maine’s net metering requirements. The state Public Utilities Commission requires that major utilities buy back power for specific alternative energy sources, including wind and solar power.

Net metering, as it is known, allows a utility customer to “roll over” the excess power they produce by alternative sources and feed it back to the utility, in this case Central Maine Power. That’s particularly attractive for Allen’s, which has peak usage time during the blueberry harvest in August. The rest of the year the turbine might often generate more power than the plant needs.

“If they generate more than they use, under Maine rules, they’re able to get credit for those months,” Lee said.

The operation did require local planning board approval before construction began. Local residents expressed some concern about the noise the turbine will generate. Lee said the turbine will rotate at a “leisurely pace” of 60 revolutions per minute.

“It’s going to produce some noise,” he said. “And neighbors may hear it in certain situations.”

Endless Energy’s federal contract calls for two commercial sites in Maine, and Lee said he is currently looking for a second location.

The company also plans to develop a wind farm near Sugarloaf in western Maine, which will have 45 wind turbines, each capable of producing 30 megawatts of power. That’s the equivalent of the power needed to run 300 average houses. The company plans to seek environmental permits for the project early in 2001.