There's a trail at Jiminy Peak ski area in Hancock called "West Way." On most days, if you hold your arms out straight while you're skiing or riding down the trail, you will nearly stop because of the force of the sustained northwest wind.
Jiminy Peak decided to harness this annoyance by installing a windmill in an area to the left of the trail. As you round the corner, the imposing rotating structure dominates the view.
It's no little windmill. The turbine tower is 253 feet high. Each of the three blades is about 122 feet. When you include the 10-foot hub, the distance from the base of the tower to the blade tip is 386 feet. The installed cost of the turbine was almost $4 million.
This medium-sized (1,150 ft. vertical) Berkshire ski area is the first in the country to do such a thing with private funding. Why Jiminy? According to their marketing director Betsy Strickler, "Jiminy Peak has been involved in energy conservation for years. We wanted to do something that would push the envelope."
The cost of electricity rose 50 percent for the 2005-2006 ski season compared to the year before. They needed to come up with something to stabilize that cost.
Snowmaking uses more electricity than anything else at the resort. The wind is strongest in the winter months. A wind turbine will enable Jiminy to stabilize a portion of its energy costs well into the future. The wind turbine is expected to provide 33 percent of Jiminy Peak's electricity annually. In the winter, when the wind is more sustained, it should reach 50 percent. This would result in a payoff of the turbine's cost in seven to seven and a half years.
Lifts, snowmaking and lighting aren't used in summer but the turbine will continue to produce electricity during the summer months. The turbine is hooked up to Jiminy Peak's Country Inn and several restaurants at the base of the mountain. In the spring and fall, when there isn't much activity, excess power will be sold back to the grid.
Strickler noted that some neighbors were opposed to the windmill at first. Since it is not a wind farm, the opposition wasn't as heated as it might have been. However, the windmill is highly visible in the vicinity of the mountain. Still, she says, "Once they have seen it they say, 'That's kind of nice,' or 'I still don't love it, but it's saving so much that I'm not complaining.'"
It was no easy task to get the 500 tons of parts and equipment up the mountain. A two-mile long gravel road was built over one of the easier ski trails. Even that trail had some "more difficult" pitches for the equipment to ascend. What is known as the nacelle, which contains the turbine machinery and is perched behind the blades on the tower, weighs 60 tons by itself. Two bulldozers pulled it from the front and two more helped out in back.
When I skied at Jiminy recently, I couldn't hear the windmill. (Of course, they were making snow at the time, so that could have had something to do with it.) They claim that, at the bottom of the tower, the noise level is 60 decibels. Then it decreases to 30 decibels at 200 yards.
Since Jiminy relies on machine-made snow, it depends on electricity to keep operating. It is hoped that the turbine will result in minimal price increases to its customers. So next time you ski or ride down "West Way," keep your hands by your side and appreciate that northwest wind as it powers the turbine named after the Greek god of the west wind, "Zephyr."
