How come we're not doing this? What? Oh!

Well, we don't yet have a wind farm, but we (or Amesbury) does have a farm using wind energy.
This report in the green tech gazette talks about wind energy in Michigan, and Flint in particular:

According to [a man named Steve] Smiley, part of the infrastructure to build the needed wind turbines exists in Flint, Michigan which will make the residents there plus Michael Moore very happy people. I’ve talked in the past about combining wind and water turbines in one platform where both the air and watery currents would support it.

Gordon Young talks about this on his most recent post on Flint Expatriates, so let's forget about Flint and move east to Newburyport.

This week, the Zoning Board of Appeals granted Mark Richey Woodworking a special permit to build a 600kW wind turbine on its property in the industrial park.

From the Daily News:

Passage of Richey's turbine proposal represents the first permit of its kind to be granted by the ZBA under the City Council's newly adopted ordinance governing wind turbines, and garnered mostly support from those attending Tuesday night's second public hearing on the matter.

This is really good news for our city.

As for concerns about noise, one only needs to mosey up the road to Cider Hill Farm and check out the turbines there. They really are quite beautiful and relatively silent.

I found some wind energy FAQs here, in which I found this: One 600kW wind turbine at a reasonable site would produce enough electricity to meet the annual needs of 375 households.

Holy moly! The ones at Cider Hill Farm are 10kW each.

The good news is, through green energy initiatives, the energy goes onto the grid. We all benefit.

Also check out this story from June, also in the Daily News, about the WindWing, which the developers say is simpler and more efficient than the turbine. Not as pretty, but it looks like it has merit.

This if from an Aug. 2007 story in the Ventura County Star:

The up-and-down flapping hints at one of the system's benefits over its propeller-equipped kin -- that it is less likely to kill birds.

I think it's kind of funny how everything old is new again. We used to have a windmill on our farm, when I was a kid ...