WORLD WIND ENERGY NET

Hancock, Mass. -- Like surgery, reassembling a wind turbine requires a precise hand.
"Cable easy, cable easy," a man's voice said through walkie-talkies to workers operating two cranes. They lifted some 31 tons -- a hub and three blades resembling a propeller for a gigantic aircraft -- atop a 253-foot pole at Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort.

The popular Berkshires skiing destination has made environmental sustainability its mantra.

The $3.9 million, 1.5-megawatt turbine, named "Zephyr" after the Greek god of the west winds, was repaired after a brief time online this summer.

It will generate 4.9 million kilowatt hours of electricity annually, enough for a third of the power used by the resort. That's the equivalent of air-conditioning 613 homes for a year, according to the resort's Web site.

Jiminy Peak is the first mountain resort in North America to install a wind turbine to generate power, according to the National Ski Areas Association. It also claims to be the first private company in the United States to buy a megawatt-class size turbine. A megawatt equals 1 million watts.

The project is expected to save the resort almost half of its energy costs and pay for itself in seven years. The resort paid $1.1 million for electricity last year.

It's a rocky climb up the 2.3-mile, 27-degree incline to the tower. Renegade mountain bicyclists have been known to take off from the 2,000-foot Summit Reservoir and arrive at the base in 45 seconds. But it took a sport utility vehicle carrying three people about 10 minutes to drive down the mountain earlier this week.

On an overcast day, the wind slowly picked up, moving the thick gray clouds across the sky.

Held by lines from the two cranes, the hub and blades inched up skyward in an hour. The crew moved the load slightly left and right to adjust for the wind, which was expected to reach as high as 25 mph by the afternoon.

Once the turbine was in place atop the tower, workers inside attached it with 44 bolts, each 10 inches long and 1 3/8 inches across.

Jiminy Peak employees and workers from W.O. Grubb Crane Rental of Richmond, Va., waited several days for a relatively calm day to lift the assembly into the air. "It is like a big kite up there," said James Van Dyke, Jiminy Peak's vice president of environmental sustainability.

By 8 p.m. Monday, the turbine was spinning again, producing electricity. It requires winds of at least 6 mph to operate and can run safely in speeds up to 55 mph.

Beyond that speed, an internal computer shuts down the assembly to prevent equipment damage, although the blades will continue to spin slowly in a process called "pinwheeling."

The wind turbine opened to some fanfare in August, but a problem surfaced even before then, said Van Dyke.

Each 120-foot fiberglass blade is controlled by an electric motor that adjusts the blade's angle and pitch into the wind. But one blade kept slipping out of alignment with the other two.

Repairs were covered under warranty by General Electric, which sold and installed the turbine.

In the windier winter months, the resort will use all the turbine's power, Van Dyke said. In the summer, when the resort uses less power, any excess will be sold back to National Grid.

Unfortunately, said Van Dyke, that is not quite as lucrative as it could be, because the resort pays 16 cents a kilowatt hour for power provided by National Grid, but gets only get 6 cents per hour for power that it sells.

Keeping track of the turbine tower isn't just a 40-hour-a-week job for Van Dyke, who checks on its status even when he is at home through an Internet connection to an internal computer. But the tower's computer will make some decisions on its own.

For example, if blades begin to ice up, the computer senses the ice's extra weight, which could damage the blades, and shuts down the mechanism. It will be up to the weather to do the de-icing.

Wells below the tower and surrounding shale help keep a lightning strike from frying the electronics.

In ski season, the resort will need extra electricity to draw water from its 10-million-gallon reservoir for snowmaking.

"We normally start blowing snow anytime after Halloween," Van Dyke said.

Varughese, an environmental journalism fellow from the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting at the University of Rhode Island, can be reached at 454-5587 or by e-mail at jvarughese@timesunion.com.