Swan's Island Wind Project

Like Vinalhaven and North Haven, Swan’s Island serves both year-round and summer ratepayers on two islands, including Frenchboro further offshore. These islands also purchase power from the mainland via a submarine cable and pay rates twice the state average and three times the national average.

In order to assess the feasibility for developing Swan’s and Frenchboro’s wind resources, it was necessary first to install anemometers to collect data for these communities.  At the request of the Swan’s Island Electric Cooperative, the Island Institute funded the placement of an Island Fellow to coordinate the preliminary wind studies needed for economic and financial analyses. The Rural Electric Research Lab (RERL) at UMass, Amherst, supplied the anemometers, which were installed in 2007 on a cell-phone tower.

The first full year of wind data strongly suggests that these two island communities also have a highly robust local wind resource that could be developed in a manner similar to the Fox Islands.

We plan to implement a public education and outreach strategy that will unfold during the 2009-2010 period that could lead to a community vote and proposal to locate one 1.5-megawatt turbine on Swan’s Island.