By Carol Britton Meyer

Both of the town’s wind turbines are out of commission and the unit at Pemberton Point needs to be removed or replaced due to damage from the elements, the light board’s chair confirmed this week.

The wind turbine at Hull High School has been not been operational since April 2021 due to its deteriorating condition, and the one at the landfill more recently due to recurring electrical issues.

When both turbines are working to capacity, the electricity generated is equivalent to 11 percent of the Hull Municipal Lighting Plant’s power portfolio.

Hull Wind 1 at the high school, which when fully operational supplies enough electricity annually to power the town’s street lights and traffic control signals as well as 220 homes, either needs to be refurbished at a cost of about $1.5 million to replace the nacelle, or upper portion, and blades or be taken down, Hull Municipal Light Board Chair Patrick Cannon told The Hull Times.

“It can’t be repaired because the technology is outdated,” he said.

Independent inspections revealed heavy pitting and deterioration of all bearing surfaces from the blades all the way to the generator, in addition to heavy surface damage to the blades due to salt spray from the ocean, according to the HMLP statement.

Hull Wind 1 was commissioned in December 2001, and turbines of that vintage have a lifespan of about 20 years.

If the turbine is refurbished, it would remain at its current height, due to Federal Aviation Administration regulations, Cannon said.

“We have received estimates for such a task and are performing a cost/benefit analysis to determine if this is a viable project to undertake,” HMLP Operations Manager Panos Tokadjian said in the recent HMLP statement. “Once we have completed the analysis, we will submit our conclusion to the light board for discussion.”

Hull Wind 2, which generates enough energy to power 800 homes on an annual basis when working at capacity, “has been given a clean bill of health,” Cannon said, but is offline due to recurring issues in the nacelle that the technical maintenance crews of the manufacturer have been unable to pinpoint or repair.

In the meantime, Vestas – the company that installed the turbine in 2006 – notified light plant officials when their agreement with the town expired last July that the company is no longer interested in doing maintenance work on the turbine.

“We have been reaching out, and we know of at least two companies that we’ll recommend to [potentially] make the repairs,” Cannon said. The cost of tracking down the problem, repairing it, and bringing the turbine back to operating condition has not yet been determined.

This issue of the turbines did come up at the Oct. 20 light board meeting under the “light board discussion on goals and objectives” agenda item, according to Cannon, but because this topic wasn’t listed on the agenda, the conversation was limited.

“We talked about current overall concerns that we need to pay attention to moving forward, and naturally the turbines were brought up,” he said. “When we plan to discuss them again, we will be sure to put it on the agenda.”