Mayflower Wind’s substation would be located at the Lawrence- Lynch property on Gifford Street.
Mayflower Wind’s substation would be located at the Lawrence- Lynch property on Gifford Street.
Mayflower Wind’s offshore wind energy turbines 26 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard clearly provide a benefit for the planet, producing 800 megawatts of electricity without carbon emissions from coal, fuel oil or natural gas. It’s also clearly a benefit for future electric utility ratepayers—a wholesale price of 5.8 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2019 dollars, including all transmission costs.
Mayflower proposes to have its transmission cables make landfall at Falmouth Heights beach, and the potential health effects of a high-voltage electric current running through a highly dense seasonal population is an issue there. The practical effect of digging up the Heights ballfield or Worcester Park (which was only recently dug up for the Little Pond sewer project) is also on residents’ minds.
But to get all this electricity from the Heights landfall to the New England grid and its ultimate users, Mayflower needs more from Falmouth than a landfall site. It needs a substation site—a very large one. Look at the existing NSTAR substation at the corner of Sandwich and Ashumet roads. Now imagine a similar installation 18 times larger—26 acres, almost the size of Falmouth Mall.
Mayflower needs to construct a substation whose maximum size would be that large, composed of a vast array of circuit breakers, switchgear, shunt reactors, instrumentation, overvoltage protection and transformers.
Mayflower has two Falmouth sites in mind.
Its preferred site is the 27.3-acre Lawrence-Lynch asphalt aggregate plant location on Gifford Street.
Abutters to this property include the town DPW, Oak Grove Cemetery, Homeport, and homes on Rogers Road, Stephens Lane and Jones Road.
Mayflower notes the substation “may emit offensive noise/vibrations,” and plans to offer “noise mitigation strategies such as low noise transformers, enclosing certain substation components, and sound barriers.” As of this writing Mayflower is still in discussions with Lawrence-Lynch about acquiring this site.
Mayflower’s second choice for a substation is eight miles north of the Heights, a mostly treeless 33.6-acre parcel owned by Cape Cod Aggregates used for sand and gravel processing on the north side of Thomas B. Landers Road near the Blacksmith Shop Road intersection.
This parcel has a few residential abutters and is in the town’s water resource protection district. The proposed substation will use dielectric fluids, a hazardous material, to cool its electrical components, and that is a concern. Mayflower does hold an option on this property.
When Barnstable negotiated its Host Community Agreement (HCA) with Vineyard Wind in 2018, it included guarantees around keeping dielectric fluid out of the groundwater, no construction near the beach from April 30 to September 15, payments of $640,000 to the town for 25 years totaling $16 million, $80,000 for bathhouse reconstruction, and repaving the town beach parking lot.
Falmouth Town Hall has been in negotiations with Mayflower Wind since October 2020. Falmouth’s Host Community Agreement should include everything in Barnstable’s. In addition, the final agreement should include specific mitigation measures—recommended by experts working for the town, not for Mayflower—addressing any potential noise, odor, vibrations, visual and environmental impacts on either site.
This mammoth installation, whether located in our town center or above our aquifer, deserves a lot more attention than it has received so far. Nothing of this industrial scale currently exists in town, and once it is in place, it will be here forever.
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Eric makes some good points, as usual. Electric substations are ugly. But, if you think about it, when’s the last time you even noticed electrical infrastructure? Do the 115.000 volt lines running parallel to Gifford Street bother you? Have you even noticed there’s already a substation adjacent to a Homeport parking lot? We don’t really see these things, they just sit there for decades, providing an essential service. Speaking of ugly.. how about this statement from the Falmouth Enterprise on 1/21/22: “We estimate that 849 structures, primarily residential, will be seaward of the high tide line by 2070. They may be underwater all the time, or they may be in the intertidal zone and experience water twice a day”. Now that’s going to be UGLY! We need to stop passively waiting for climate change mitigation to come from someone else, somewhere else. Cape Wind already failed due to litigation from oceanfront tycoons. Falmouth’s turbines sit idle, waiting for demolition. Let’s become part of the solution, instead of part of the problem. Falmouth could facilitate offshore wind, instead of fighting it. Now I can hear you saying “One offshore wind farm won’t solve climate change!”. Well, that’s true. But we need to start somewhere, right? Your grandchildren will live in a safer, more stable world, if they have clean, decarbonized electricity.
This is the wrong place for such a huge industrial site. It's too close to residences, not to mention medical offices and nursing facilities. If Mayflower is talking about noise now, believe it, it WILL be noisy. It will also be a source of electrical noise which may have unintended effects in the area.
While it's easy to get starry-eyed about savings on your electric bill and low carbon emissions, let's not abandon common sense here. Those investing in Mayflower Wind are not particularly concerned where this is sited, but we need to be. There is massive legal and financial power here, we need to tread carefully.
Both proposed locations, gravel pits, ARE already "huge industrial sites".
Yet both locations terminate operations during traditional sleeping hours. Major extra high voltage substations (proposed to be the 1st in Falmouth) operate continuously radiating an audible "buzz" and audible impulse noise particularly from air-blast breakers.
Mayflower says the substation “may emit offensive noise/vibrations.” After reviewing documents submitted to the Mass Energy Facilities Siting Board Mayflower's consideration of adverse noise impacts of the substation seems deficient. The substation transformer(s), necessary for this proposed project, would emit 90-100 decibels. International health standards established by the World Health Organization identify night time noise levels above 42 dBA measured outdoors as a cause of sleep disturbance leading to secondary adverse health impacts. That's a lot of noise to to mitigate especially when Mayflower Wind Substation at the Lawrence Lynch site is immediately adjacent to residences, and the substation fence line could potentially be within 100 ft (30 m) of the nearest residence. Besides, the impact on the landscape of the substations in either location, is a scale and mass not in keeping with the scale and character of either a village or semi-rural landscape - it's "Industrial". We have an Industrial Park in Falmouth for industrial uses!
91-100 dB: This is all about the level at which you're want to add some earplugs. Cars without a muffler and gas-powered lawnmowers sit in the 90 to 100 decibel range. Anything in this degree might provide you with a sound criticism from the neighbors
Honestly, have you EVER heard a transformer? Stand outside the fence at a substation (like the one beside doctors offices in Homeport), and see if you can hear anything but crickets. Fictional detriments are often cited when people don’t want to admit their true motivation: right-wing politics & climate change denial.
There are nearly 20 EHV (extra high voltage) operational substations in the USA. The remaining 55,000 substations across the country are categorized as regional or local substations. The two latter, carry/convert voltage loads no where near Mayflower's proposed substation in Falmouth. In terms of noise generated, to use blowin smoke's example, it would the difference between hearing a Cessna 150 departing Hyanis airport versus a USAF F-15 departing in afterburner at Joint-Base Cape Cod (the old OTIS Air Station). Be warry of the true motives of Green New Deal progressives!
The Falmouth Town Manager, Energy Committee, Conservation Board and Select Board have been meeting in public and executive sessions over a Community Host Agreement for almost two years.
The Select Board will hold a public forum on April 30 and/or May 7 at the Lawrence School Auditorium about Mayflower Wind.
When the two Falmouth town owned wind turbines were installed the noise documents that the turbines generated 110 decibels of noise were omitted from any public hearing and were disclosed later in the nuisance court cases.
The bid for the demolition of the two town owned wind turbines is due April 14,2022 at 2 PM
Deja vu... the same non-resident agitator is at it again, spinning an odd mixture of distortions and nonsense.
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