New Turbine At Upper Cape Tech

Upper Cape Technical School has a new 10kw turbine. The turbine uses a brand new kind of tower that allows for easy tilt down for maintenance. The students of the school helped to construct the turbine, in collaboration with Cape And Islands Self Reliance and Clean Energy Design.

Self Reliance put on a week long wind workshop, the attendees spent half of each day learning about the wind, electricity, and turbine technology, and the second half of each day installing the tower, and turbine.

After more than a week of really hard work the turbine was ready to go up. The counter balance tower worked like a charm. The hydraulic arm lowered the tower right down to the ground, we attached the turbine and blades and sent her up.

When the turbine started spinning I was simply amazed at how silent it was. I have been around several large and small scale turbines and all of them have made a gentle whoosh sound. This turbine is silent. We were all floored at how quiet it is.

The students came out to see the turbine go up, and had a lot of questions about how it worked and how the tower worked. They got really excited when they learned that they would be providing the maintenance for this machine.

Both tech schools on cape now have a PV array, and a wind turbine. This allows them to offer classes on renewable energy technology. A new industry is being built from the ground up here on Cape Cod, and now we will have skilled craftsmen and women ready to enter it.

The turbine is a learning tool, it will provide a large amount of energy, enough to cover 2 to 3 normal sized homes. The tower is the first of its kind, a counter balance tilt up tower. It allows easy tilting down of the tower for servicing of the turbine, without any guy-wires. This allows the tower to keep a very small footprint, something that is often needed in areas where space is limited.

The workshop was a great success, and a good time was had by all!