Turbinium

Those Lutheran copycats over at St. Olaf have their own wind turbine up now, as documented in photos on Flickr and this blog and on St. Olaf's website (warning: out of date materials). The Olaf turbine is a monster, but it went up almost exactly two years after the other Northfield college put up its own turbine, the first "utility-grade" turbine put up by an American college. Carleton's machine is 230 feet tall to its hub, 360 feet to the top of its rotor sweep. That's tall, and quite beautiful. Whether or not the Olaf machine is bigger, the town now has a nicely symmetrical pair of turbines: the Olaf one on the west, the Carleton one on the east, both visible from many spots south of downtown, and each putting millions of kilowatts per year into the grid.

email: christopher at tassava dot com