Martha’s Vineyard’s integrated design/build company
My colleagues and fellow owners Deirdre, Rob, Siobhán and I just returned from a conference in Boston called Local Sustainable Economies. It was a national gathering, hosted by the Sustainable Business Network of Massachusetts, of people and organizations working to localize economic activity and encourage the long haul shift from the extractive economy of the present to a generative economy of the future.
Read More about Local Sustainable Economies…And Way More Than That
For the Earth Day campaign mentioned in the last post, SunPower created two videos and three blog posts. This link will take you to their second video and second blog post. Please take the journey to explore the SunPower/South Mountain relationship further. This one is about the connection between our devotion to craft and our passion for solar. The two go hand in hand.
We’ll send out another reminder when the 3rd SunPower blog post is up. Thanks for listening!
For several years our 100’ steel tower stood here without a wind turbine on top. We took the machine down for repairs and never put it back up. We decided to save it for parts, for the several other similar turbines we installed years ago in other locations.
Meanwhile, we have covered the roofs of our building here with enough solar panels to take care of all the energy needs for our shop and offices. Having just switched our heating and cooling to all-electric air source heat pumps, we’re pretty much at Net Zero for the entire facility (we’ll find out for sure after a year of monitoring).
We’re not in the wind business any more (as important as we think it is), and our experiment had not been particularly successful, so it was time to take the tower down, pack it up, and prepare it for its next home. Pete D’Angelo and Phil Forest orchestrated the project.
But before it came down, Phil, who was always responsible for servicing the machine, felt the need to experience the top of the tower one more time.
Here’s what Phil had to say, and what he saw, and what we saw:
“While I sat comfortably on top of the wind turbine tower, waiting for the crane to arrive, I took in the fall foliage of the oak forest and I saw water in Lake Tashmoo brought in from the last tide. I thought about the impermanent, ever- changing nature of things.
