Community windmills glide into the Berkshires

By Claire Cox12:00AM / Wednesday, April 28, 2004Print Story | Email Story

From left to right, Kristen Burke, Sally D. Wright and Nancy Nylen at the windmill meeting in Lenox. (Photo by Claire Cox)

Proposals for the county's first wind towers for generating â€œpollution-freeâ€ electricity for three Berkshire towns are in their final permit processes, and construction of a single tower in Lenox is under preliminary consideration. A meeting in Lenox Town Hall on April 22 generated information about prospects for wind power throughout the county. The Lenox Environmental Committee, the Berkshire Renewable Energy Collaborative, the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative and the University of Massachusetts Renewable Energy Research Laboratory sponsored it. About 50 people, including interested representatives of Becket, Chester, Cheshire, Great Barrington and Richmond, attended the two-hour session, along with a resident of Princeton, in Worcester County, which has one of the oldest wind-tower sites in the United States. Jamie Cahillane, facilitator of the Lenox Environmental Committee, said in an interview that an evaluation committee would be organized soon for a study on the feasibility of constructing a 1.5-megawatt windmill to provide electricity for the townâ€™s water filtration system. Princeton has two towers and recently received permission to expand. Massachusetts has one other operating wind project, a single tower in the coastal town of Hull, owned by the municipal light plant. Closer to home, the Green Mountain Power Companyâ€™s 11-windmill farm in Searsburg, Vt., across the border from Berkshire County, has become a popular tourist attraction, and plans are afoot for its expansion. The proposals for Berkshire's first windmills, which are reaching the end of a long approval process, call for two commercially sponsored wind farms, one with 20 towers at the Hoosac Wind Project in the towns of Florida and Monroe, the other with 10 towers on Brodie Mountain in Hancock. Disgen, a Colorado company, is sponsoring the Hancock project, and enXco, an international company based in Palm Springs, Calif., is developing the Hoosac farm. Both have gone through a planning process that calls first for site inspection to determine whether a property is viable for a tower, then construction of a temporary tower to measure the wind velocity and frequency on the site. The final step will be the installation of the massive wind turbines, and their connection to the local power system. It takes at least two years from site inspection to the generation of the first kilowatt. Commercial developments are required to be certified by the state under the Massachusetts Environmental Protection Act, while town-sponsored â€œcommunity windmillâ€ projects, such as the one in Hull and the one proposed for Lenox, may need only Planning Board approval. A proposal for a preliminary wind-measuring tower permit for a commercial project in North Adams, near the Hoosac Wind site, was rejected by the townâ€™s Planning Board on the basis that the entire project, including the number of windmills, had to be submitted, under MEPA regulations. The board followed the lead of the Berlin, N.Y., Zoning Board of Appeals, which denied a permit for wind-measuring tower for a Williams College proposal for windmills in that town. Gregory Federspiel, Lenox town manager, who introduced the speakers at the Town Hall meeting, expressed the hope that the town eventually could supply electricity to the water filtration plant, which now costs the town about $100,000 a year to operate. At maximum capacity, a wind tower generator could reduce or eliminate the cost to the taxpayers and might even return a profit, according to Federspiel. He indicated it might be possible to place a windmill on a site near the filtration plant, which is easily reachable by Reservoir Road. Cahillane said he hoped the evaluation committee would include members from other communities, principally from neighboring Richmond, which has expressed interest in the possibility of a joint Lenox-Richmond wind-power project â€œThis is all very preliminary,â€ Cahillane said. He added that the main issue facing his committee is to determine whether there is enough wind at a designated site to power a windmill. The committee will also have to deal with the concerns of residents of the area, he said. â€œWe want to be good neighbors, and we want to see if Lenox residents are interested in having a wind-power tower in their town,â€ he said. Nancy Nylen of the Center for Ecological Technology in Pittsfield opened the case for â€œgreen powerâ€ for the Berkshires. â€œPeople are really wanting to have more and better choices for local, clean power at low cost,â€ she said. â€œThe more people learn, the better.â€ The other speakers, Sally D. Wright for the Renewable Energy Research Laboratory in Amherst, and Kristen Burke for the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative in Westboro, showed slides illustrating wind projects at work and listing seven steps from project conception to operation and maintenance, with wind analysis, public education and budgeting and financing along the way. They explained that wind-generated electricity is called green power because the energy-producing turbines do not create toxic pollutants or climate-changing gasses. Wind power is clean and renewable, Wright said, while power plants that burn coal, gas and oil emit more air pollution than any other industries. According to the research laboratory, at least 40 communities in western Massachusetts have the potential for creating community windmill projects on municipally owned land.

Stockbridge Grange Community Dinner

03:12PM / Tuesday, February 03, 2026

STOCKBRIDGE, Mass. — The Stockbridge Grange is holding a community dinner on Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026, featuring spaghetti and meatballs, salad, and bread with dessert choices of chocolate cream or lemon meringue pie.

Dinner is $17.00 per person, take out only with 12-1:30 pm pick up at the Stockbridge Grange Hall at 51 Church Street, Stockbridge. Orders may be made by calling 413-243-1298 or 413-443-4352.

Inclement weather postpones the meal for a week.