Taking windmill blades to the edge

[n2doc]

By Erin Ailworth
Globe Staff / June 20, 2011
Max Eliot stopped just inside the door at the state’s new Wind Technology Testing Center in Charlestown, eyes wide at the nearly 160-foot fiberglass blade bolted to a far wall, left hand tight around a set of model wind blades he made for his sixth-grade graduation project.


Overhead, a large blade from Clipper Windpower of California undulated as workers in a control room used remote controls to replicate the stress a working turbine would endure in its lifetime. It’s here that turbine manufacturers like Clipper, or blade makers like TPI Composites in Fall River, send the blades they have designed to be checked for efficiency, strength, and durability.

Patrick Cloney, the day’s tour guide, smiled at Eliot, 12, from the Neighborhood School in Jamaica Plain. Cloney is executive director of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, which promotes renewable energy. The agency had invited the boy and his mother to tour the month-old, $30 million facility after hearing about Eliot’s project, which analyzed different renewable energy sources, including turbines.

“So you like wind blades?’’ Cloney asked.

“Yep,’’ replied Eliot (inset), donning a lime green hard hat.

“Well, we’ve got a little one right here,’’ Cloney said, only half joking. The center, he explained, was built to test blades up to 300 feet long, or about the length of a football field. The $200,000 Clipper blade mounted in the facility’s test bay was only about half that size.


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