Dreams of dollars blown away

Kittery wind turbine turns out to be an underperformer

KITTERY, Maine

Having recently received results from the eight-month wind energy demonstration project, Carter said analysis of the real-time data provided by the wind turbine shows that over the time period from October 2008 to May 2009, the actual production of electricity was only 15 percent of what was originally anticipated.

The reason for its underperformance according to Carter, is most likely due to “ground clutter causing significant wind turbulence.”

“The moral of the story is we thought we did enough work to figure out the wind patterns and we thought we had a site that worked, but we didn’t realize it was not high enough to not be affected by tree turbulence,” Carter said.

Fosters