On a pair of hillsides in Downeast Maine, the blades of 19 wind turbines began rotating for the first time recently, spinning air into energy for the Boston utility NStar. The Blue Sky East project is the first of three New England wind farms — including the largest yet to be built in Massachusetts — that will begin operations before the end of the year and sell their power to NStar.
Together, they will generate enough electricity to supply roughly 50,000 homes, providing a cheaper source of power for NStar’s customers while increasing economic activity in rural areas that desperately need it. “The projects not only put people to work in rural communities,” said Paul Gaynor, chief executive of First Wind, the Boston company that developed Blue Sky East, “they also generate tax revenues for small towns to help keep taxes down and pay for important community priorities.”
Blue Sky East is located in Eastbrook, Maine, a town of just over 400 located about 40 miles east of Bangor. In addition, wind farms will soon will soon start generating power in Groton, N.H., and the Western Massachusetts towns of Florida and Monroe. These three projects, with a combined 62 turbines, will help NStar meet half the state requirement that utilities use long-term contracts get at least 3 percent of their power from renewable sources such as wind and solar. Energy from the controversial offshore Cape Wind project will more than cover the rest.
“It [means] clean power for our customers for years to come,” said James Daly, vice president of energy supply for Northeast Utilities, NStar’s parent company. Electricity from the these new, land-based wind projects is expected to be cheap because NStar signed 10- to 15-year-long contracts, which, by guaranteeing a customer for the electricity, helped lower the cost of financing the wind farms.
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