UMass Magazine Online

Summer 2003

Departments

Around the Pond

Features

The Vast Area of Small

Tiny couch potatoes

Pumped-up Roosters

The pervasive presence of microbes

At-risk Native Talk

Our giant in hedge funds

Around the Pond

Blowing up a storm

– Judson Brown




	(photo by Doug Welch)

SEVERAL CURRENT PROPOSALS TO CREATE the nation’s first offshore “wind farms” in the breezy waters off the Massachusetts coast have sparked a vigorous public debate between proponents of wind power and skeptics who fear that clusters of sky-scraping wind turbines will spoil the beauty of the coast and create hazards to wildlife.

The university’s Renewable Energy Research Laboratory (RERL) and its director, Mechanical Engineering Professor James F. Manwell, are much in demand to clarify the issues, as few are more qualified to do.

Manwell is the US representative to an international panel that is devising global standards for offshore wind power; co-author with colleagues of a leading textbook on wind energy; and chief of what is billed as the only active university-based research facility devoted to the study of wind power in the country.

Although thoroughly landlocked, the lab, tucked away in a couple of tiny offices and makeshift trailers at the edge of the engineering quad at the north end of the Amherst campus, has been a leader in research into wind-to-energy technology – and in particular into “offshore wind” – for 30 years.

The lab’s visionary founder and first director, the late William E. Heronemus, a former naval architect, was a pioneer in the research and development of offshore wind power. His vision of floating wind farms far out to sea where the winds are strongest remains “the holy grail of offshore wind,” according to Manwell.

Manwell and his team at RERL helped set the stage for the current surge of interest in non-floating coastal wind farms in Massachusetts. Supported by grants from the state Division of Energy Resources, they were busy assessing “wind resources” and a host of complex turbine siting issues along the Massachusetts coast beginning in the mid-’90s. This was several years before the company Cape Wind Associates presented its controversial plan to erect 130 wind turbines on Horseshoe Shoal in Nantucket Sound, and before another company, Winergy, followed with applications for permits for a series of wind farms comprising 850 turbines at locations stretching from Gloucester to Falmouth.

Manwell, 55, an Amherst College graduate who got his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from UMass in 1981, took over directorship of the RERL in 1986 and immediately oversaw a revival of research activity when, with a lift from Congressman Silvio Conte, the lab received back-to-back federal grants totaling $1.9 million.

In the early 1990’s, RERL bought and erected on Mount Tom in nearby Easthampton a used 250-kilowatt turbine and has been operating a wind research and teaching station there ever since.

One of the most rewarding projects the lab has taken on in recent years was as a principal consultant to the Hull Municipal Light Company. Laboratory staff and graduate students provided the initial wind resource data and advice on permitting, designing and siting a 660-kilowatt wind turbine which went on line in that coastal community about a year ago.

Meanwhile, the lab has launched a new program, the Wind Energy Predevelopment Support Program, intended to build on the Hull success, and spur the spread of small- to medium-sized wind plants across the Massachusetts landscape by providing wind resource assessment, general consulting and loaner testing equipment to interested towns, small businesses and landowners. The state’s Renewable Energy Trust Fund is looking to grant $500,000 for the project, although at press time, the money was not yet in hand.

This is a time that’s both enormously promising and – in terms of funding – precarious as ever for the trend-setting research lab, Manwell said.

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