I can see it from here. There in the distance, rising above Boston Harbor, the blades of a wind turbine steadily twirl. The atmosphere is moving today, flowing with energy, as we sail from Winthrop and set course for Hull. The canvas billows overhead as we glide across the bay, a sliver of fabric by the wind.
Though we do not directly sense it, air has mass. At sea level, 14.7 pounds of atmosphere—the equivalent of a column of water 34 feet tall—are bearing down on every square inch of your head. If all the air were sucked out of your body, it would instantly implode. Not because of the inward sucking pressure of an internal vacuum, but because the weight of the surrounding atmosphere would crush you. Fortunately air surrounds us, fills us up, and essentially supports itself, allowing us to exist without fear of an atmospheric crunch.
But when air starts moving, all that weight begins to exert significant force on obstacles in its path. And the faster it moves, the more powerful it becomes. As wind speed rises, the force it generates increases exponentially. A 40 mile-per-hour blow is four times as powerful as a 20 mph wind and 16 times as powerful as a 10 mph breeze—which is more than sufficient to power our 22-foot sail-boat across Boston Harbor today. This is the first leg of my journey through the wind spectrum, an exploration of rising atmospheric power and its effects on the Northeastern landscape.
We glide by Georges Island and past views of Boston Light, cruising toward the Hull Gut, a narrow passage between Peddocks Island and the tip of the Hull Peninsula. Surfcasters sit on the cobblestone shore, stalking striped bass. A short distance away, adjacent to the squat brick buildings of Hull High School, perched on the farthest promontory of land, sits the gleaming white wind turbine.
The blades of the turbine cut through the air above my head. I’ve returned to the site early one Monday morning to meet with Andrew Stern, one of the principal movers behind Hull’s wind efforts. A volunteer with the non-profit Hull Wind, Stern arrives off the ferry from Boston, clad in knee-length shorts, flip-flops, and a bright blue Hawaiian-style shirt. His enthusiasm for alternative energy—“I once built a solar-powered car and raced it from Orlando, Florida, to Detroit, Michigan”—is immediately apparent.
We stand at the base of the 164-foot tower, which rises from an octagonal concrete pedestal surrounded by flowering purple clover. “This is what clean energy looks like,” Stern says, craning his neck upward. The noise from the whooshing machine barely registers and we talk at a normal level; the sound of ankle-high wavelets lapping on the adjacent beach is more audible than the spinning blades overhead.
A small oval door is sealed off at the tower’s base, providing access to the six wrist-thick cables that deliver electricity to a small adjacent transformer box. Stern points across the sandy high school football field toward a utility pole, the start of a string of power lines headed south. “Over there. That’s where it pipes electrons straight into the grid. Not to be soapboxy, but you can read all the windmill stories you want. This is real.”
The wind regime. Photo: iStock.
