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Block Island Times

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Front Page

December 3, 2005

Island-based company in charge of largest R.I. wind-energy project to date
By Abby Fox

Paul Jestings (PAS), Brother Joseph Byron (PAS), Maryanne Edwards (First Selectwoman), Janice McClanaghan (RI Renewable Energy Fund) and Jim DeVecchi (PAS headmaster) at the groundbreaking.

A small community of Benedictine monks have become pioneers of large-scale wind power in Rhode Island. The Portsmouth Abbey School, situated on a lovely 500-acre campus in Portsmouth, is in the process of building a foundation for a 660-kilowatt Vestas-47 wind turbine, scheduled to be erected next spring.

The brainchild for the project is Brother Joseph Byron, and the project manager is Block Island’s own Henry duPont, managing director of Lorax Energy systems, a small, four-year-old, Block Island-based company that specializes in installing large-scale wind projects across the country.

The windmill, once installed in March or April, will be very tall: a 164-foot tower, 12 feet in diameter, with three 77-foot blades that span 154 feet in diameter. It’s 241 feet at its highest point. No windmills on Block Island can compare to its size. The North Light’s windmill is 64 feet high and duPont’s own windmill near his West Side home is 60 feet high. The cellular tower behind the Block Island Power Company, 250 feet tall, is the closest comparison.

A simulated photo of the wind turbine in its future location prepared by Roger Williams University students. The Portsmouth Abbey dining hall is in the foreground. Photo courtesy of Portsmouth Abbey

This project has brought with it many “firsts” for Rhode Island. Portsmouth Abbey is the first entity in the state to install a utility-sized wind turbine. The project also has received $450,000 from the state’s energy office, more than any other previous renewable-energy endeavor.

Brother Joseph expects that the $1.2-million turbine will supply about 40 percent of the annual electricity needs of the college prep school and monastery, and will pay for itself in only five to seven years. It could amount to slashing the monastery’s bill by as much as 1.2 million kilowatt-hours annually, a big savings.

When asked why he decided last year that the monastery would undertake such a large project in such a pristine place, Brother Joseph’s answers were simple. The abbey decided, “Somebody should be taking the lead, and we’re going to be the ones to do it,” he said. “Somebody had to break the ice.”

Technicians working on the windmill that duPont’s company installed off I-93 in Boston.

He acknowledged that the abbey started taking wind energy seriously when “oil prices went through the roof.” Before then, “We were never really game,” he said. “It just seemed so big and overwhelming to try.” But considering that the school uses 2 million kilowatt-hours a year and that electricity bills are $200,000 a year, “We decided that we should just try it.”

The abbey was able to take some money out of its endowment to fund the project, and the renewable energy fund grant “was a godsend,” he said. And now that lower utility bills are on the horizon, Brother Joseph said the abbey looks forward to tackling its “huge deferred list” of maintenance and capital projects.

Hiring a contractor and

convincing the community

Brother Joseph doesn’t have a background in science or engineering; at the school, he runs the stage crew for the theater. So when he called the state’s energy office for help last year, he was told to contact Lorax Energy Systems. “We had no clue how to go about this,” he said. The state energy office staff members “were pretty excited. They put us in touch with Henry duPont.” A year later, Brother Joseph reports, duPont “has been terrific with us. He knows his stuff, inside and out.”

Once the abbey found someone willing to design and install the system, the first task Brother Joseph had was getting the monastery’s other 14 monks on board. In the beginning, it was a hard sell. It would mean that the turbine would be not only close to the monastery, but also, even more importantly, far higher than the church and spire, which is only 120 feet. In the abbey’s 87-year history, no building has stood higher than the church.

“Selling it to the monastery was a task and a half,” Brother Joseph said. The monks he works with “want to do the right thing, but at the same time, they don’t like change. They’re older folks here, mostly; they’ve been here their whole lives. And it’s very beautiful and quiet and peaceful here.” Frankly, he said, he had to get used to it himself. Wind turbines “are kind of cool looking, but people think they’re best seen from a distance.”

Then Brother Joseph went to the surrounding community.

“I invited them all over for a cup of cocoa, when it was all still very much in the works, and I said, ‘This is what we’re thinking about. What do you think?’” After some conversation, “They all thought it was a pretty good idea,” he said. “Virtually everybody in the room was OK about it, which I thought was kind of astounding.” Then, he said, he went to town officials and asked, “What do you think? Is this a non-starter?”

When town officials and neighbors asked about how it would look, Brother Joseph explained that the wind turbine would be “very tall,” but also “very slender,” he said. “There’s no bulk to the thing. It’s 12 feet in diameter,” he explained. It’s also about 700 feet away from the nearest neighbor.

Helping in the monastery’s decision was the example of wind technology in Hull, Mass. “We could drive up there and really experience it,” he said. “It would have been much tougher” to have gone forward with their own project without that example.

Another reason the turbine was supported is the abbey’s long-standing relationship with the community, said Kathy Heydt, the school’s director of communications, who explained that the monastery was established in 1918, and the college preparatory school in 1926. “Portsmouth Abbey has been there for so long, and the monks are highly regarded for their honesty and public service,” duPont added.

A final effort that broke most people’s resistance was when the monastery put up a meteorological monitoring pole that would be the same height as the tower, and provided a helpful photo simulation of the turbine. (See image, above.)

“We applied to the state again for a meteorological pole to do wind-testing,” Brother Joseph said. “It let people look at something that tall. It was a pretty daunting piece of equipment.”

In early deliberations, the monks discussed pushing the tower to the edge of the property so that it wouldn’t be so close to the monastery. But then, Brother Joseph realized, it would be more fair — and he’d be more likely to persuade the neighbors — if it was placed in their own backyard.

Ultimately, everyone settled on a location about 500 feet from the school’s hockey rink and the monastery, near the parking lot. “It’s a more utilitarian part of the campus,” Brother Joseph said. DuPont summed up the process: “Community support: without that, you’ve got nothing,” he said.

Allaying concerns

“Brother Joseph talked to the neighbors one by one,” Kathy Heydt said. “He really did his homework and made sure none of the issues people might be worried about were going to be actual issues.”

The abbey got the town’s approval in the spring. The Portsmouth Zoning Board unanimously granted a special-use permit and a height variance from the town’s 35-foot height limit.

Before the town and community approvals, Brother Joseph had to address a number of questions.

First, noise. Larger windmills actually make far less noise than smaller ones. “The smaller they are, the faster the blade turns, and the noisier they are,” Father Joseph said. The abbey’s wind turbine will register 45 decibels, and turn 28 revolutions per minute.

“The only time we’re ever going to hear it is on a fairly light wind day, when the turbine is turning,” he said. “I thought the sound was going to be significant, but it wasn’t. If it’s windy, or if there’s road traffic, that’s louder by far than the turbine itself.”

Bird safety was a concern. A wildlife expert told the abbey that when birds get hit by a windmill, it happens on foggy nights, not during the day. Most of the time, “They’re smart enough not to go anywhere near the thing,” Brother Joseph said. “On a foggy night, they get disoriented. They see a blinking red light on the turbine and they go toward it. But high-rise glass buildings kill a lot more birds than windmills do.”

Next, how would the turbine affect TV reception? “Early ones would, because they had metal blades,” Brother Joseph said, but newer windmill models, such as the one the abbey will have, are composite blades. As far as disruption of a satellite dish connection is concerned, a wind tower would act no differently than a tree or any other object: if it’s standing between someone’s dish and a satellite, it would block it because of physical mass, not the materials it’s made of.

Some wondered if ice or snow would build up on the blades. Brother Joseph assured people that a machine will be on hand to monitor the weather, and the turbine will shut down if the weather is too severe or if winds exceed 55 mph.

Even with the town’s blessing, it’s still expected that many eyes from all over the state will be on this project during the installation and the first few months of operation.

“Everybody’s been watching the project just to see how it goes,” Brother Joseph said. He hopes that because “We’re easy to get to here,” many people will notice it, whether they’re going to a hockey game or just passing through Aquidneck Island.

Indeed, the monastery is encouraging people to study the turbine. Local students will be able to go online and look at the wind readings, Heydt said. “We’ll have all the readings live on the Internet, so people can see what the wind is doing and how much energy it’s creating.”

As a result of this project, duPont said, Portsmouth’s Economic Development Commission has become interested in wind energy, and they’ve been talking to him about installing more wind turbines in town. “They’re fully embracing them,” he said.

Heydt said she’s excited because she thinks the wind turbine “should work perfectly for the cycle of the school.” When the winds “are stronger in winter is when we have more usage. When it will be generating the most energy is when we need it most,” she said. Then when the school lets out for the summer and energy needs decrease, the wind speeds also die down.

DuPont said he’s gratified by the project because as energy costs escalate, the school will be able to devote money that might have had to go to utility bills to more academic things.

Looking back, duPont said he’s stunned that the planning and the grant application to the state and the conversations with so many people took only a year and a half. “They did all those things in a concise and organized and timely fashion,” he said. “Most people, it takes years to pull it off. They knew what they had to do and they did it.”

The foundation, 26 feet deep and 13 feet in diameter, is currently in the process of being installed, and the turbine won’t go up until March or April. The equipment — a tower from Fargo, N.D., a turbine generator from Italy and blades from Denmark — will be arriving in the next few months.

“It takes very little time to put it up, once it gets here,” Brother Joseph said.

The project may seem huge for Rhode Island, but for duPont, it’s just another project. His business focuses on building very big machines, some “almost twice as big as a 747,” he said. After all, “If you make a wind turbine twice as big, it generates four times more energy.”

Lorax’s specialty is “putting in utility-size wind turbines at facilities,” he said. “This is something that nobody else does. We’re doing a dozen projects right now just like Portsmouth Abbey School.” In 2006, Lorax will build several new large wind machines, ranging from 100 kilowatts to 2,500 kilowatts — in New York, Wyoming, California, Montana, and Massachusetts.

Earlier this year, duPont’s company finished another New England project, easily seen on I-93 approaching downtown Boston. It installed a Fuhrlander AG, about one-third the size of the Portsmouth Abbey wind turbine and about 150 feet tall, for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 103, located there, which will power 25 homes and the union’s training facility.

What about Block Island?

“Block Island seems like an obvious choice,” for wind energy, Brother Joseph said. “For us the wind was just enough to do this. It’s OK wind, on the Narragansett Bay and on a ridge,” he said. But “You guys have tremendous wind out there,” he said. “It seems like a no-brainer.”

To duPont, it’s ironic that the island “is just about the windiest place in New England, with some of the highest [electricity] rates,” yet many of its people continue to express opposition to wind technology.

While he agrees that “This is the technology that could best be used here,” he thinks that “people aren’t ready for it,” he said.

Wind turbines work better than, say, wave technology, duPont argued — they’ve “been mature for 20 years.”

But to pursue them any more on the island would be “a dead end,” he said. “People on Block Island aren’t interested in this.”

DuPont’s explanation for the island’s hesitation with wind energy is that so many homeowners, most of whom don’t live here year-round, “have a picture of Block Island in their mind,” and “they don’t want that picture to change,” he said. “It doesn’t matter that we’re paying 38 cents a kilowatt-hour.”

The Block Island Power Company has been in the news recently for starting to consider what renewable-energy options it could use in the future. But duPont believes that BIPCo’s record shows it’s “clearly hostile to investigating this.” He’s convinced the company isn’t really interested in installing wind turbines or other renewable technologies.

One main reason is that the power company “is in the fuel business,” he said. “If a wind turbine generates kilowatt-hours, it wouldn’t come from burning diesel fuel,” which would cut into profit.

DuPont worked with BIPCo from 1976 to 1983, and was in charge of building a 200-kilowatt, 110-foot-high wind turbine behind the power company, a pilot project funded by the federal government. “I was hired by [then-president] Franklin Renz to manage that project, a young engineer just out of school,” he said. But in 1984 the company chose to “cut the legs off the wind turbine and knocked it down,” he said. The machine generated 800,000 kilowatt-hours a year, and today “It would have generated 10 percent of the island’s energy.” Cliff McGinnes Sr., BIPCo’s current chief operating officer, said that the turbine came down before his time at BIPCo, but that as he recalls, the company’s older engines weren’t “quick enough” to keep up with the turbine.

Today, the “general feeling is that the machine was a failure,” duPont said, but “that’s not true. There was nothing the matter with that machine.”

Block Island’s Zoning Ordinance is also restrictive, he said, and has made the newer, larger, state-of-the-art wind turbines virtually impossible to build here. The ordinance states that if a property line is within 225 feet of a wind-conversion system, the height can’t be more than 30 feet; if more than 225 feet from a system, the height can’t be more than 45 feet; if a property line is more than 300 feet away, the height can’t be more than 62 feet.

Two other incidents have soured duPont on turbine installation on the island.

One was when BIPCo “fought net metering to the death,” he said, which would have allowed turbine owners to sell excess electricity to the power company. The other was when duPont and others proposed two 65-kilowatt wind turbines near the Transfer Station on Corn Neck Road in 1992, and the dump road residents persuaded the Town Council to ignore the plan.

“Eventually, when we run out of fuel, what are we going to do?” duPont asked. He wishes the island would start using its “own natural resources, and not importing fuel from the outside, if you want to be sustainable. That’s something the power company should be looking at.”

Still, he repeated, “I’m not interested in advancing it here anymore. We’ve got so many good projects with people that are excited” elsewhere. “The world’s a big place.”

Years from now, duPont predicts, Block Island will permit more windmills “when our kids are on the Town Council.”

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