An interesting look at a sustainable ski resort.
A little under 1,600 feet high, Berkshire East is the kind of old-fashioned, family-run, family-friendly ski mountain you might think had vanished from New England. A quick hope over the old Boston & Maine train tracks from the Mohawk Trail, Berkshire East features a lodge that's anything but fancy, 45 trails, lots of repurposed second-hand equipment from other mountains, and $55 weekend day passes that are far below what you'd pay at fancy destination resorts further north in New England. A quick hop up Route 2 from the Connecticut River Valley, it's a popular short trip for skiiers from the Interstate 91 corridor in western Massachusetts and central Connecticut.
But in the last month, Berkshire East has added something that makes this homey mountain world-class: a $3 million wind turbine that will allow the resort to be able to say it produces 100 percent of the electricity it uses -- and actually more -- from a turbine located on resort property.
It's a project that was driven as much by "green" cash as "green" saving the planet.
"We were facing some real challenges with the price of power,'' said assistant manager Jon Schaefer, whose father, Roy, took over Berkshire East in 1977. It had been known as Thunder Mountain in the past.
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What's different at Berkshire East is that it can justifiedly say it will be the first ski resort in the world to produce the equivalent of 100 percent of its electricity from a turbine located on its own property.
BE marketing director Christopher Loftus said, "we are the fourth ski area in the world to have a wind turbine, which is exciting. We are the first in the world to be completely powered by wind with an on-site wind generator.''
Technically, Berkshire East expects to produce 135 to 140 percent of its total electric use over the course of a year; there will be moments when its 200-foot-high turbine is producing exactly the amount of power the resort is using at that moment, moments it has to pull in power from utility National Grid, and long periods like in the summer when Berkshire East is generating power it sells back to National Grid for other customers to use in Western Massachusetts. Balance it all out over the course of a year, though, and Berkshire East will be able to say its turbine's energy generates power more than equivalent to what the resort uses. State and federal taxpayers are helping through subsidies and tax breaks covering 40 percent of the cost.
It wasn't without opposition in Charlemont, where town officials held nine months of reviews and the Schaefers spent thousands of dollars on reports addressing issues like possible impacts of the 91-foot turbine blades on wildlife. The closest house is 4,000 feet away, however, which made it less contentious a battle than wind-turbine siting has been in other parts of the state.
How awesome.
My favorite quote is: "'Increases in electric and diesel costs, we couldn't survive as a business, so my brother (jim) and I put our heads together, and we came up with the idea of building the turbine,' Jon Schaefer said."
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