By: Sharon Tregaskis

Insert Don Quixote joke here. Really, any one will do. Something about tilting at windmills, perhaps. Or maybe a play on “the impossible dream.” It’s not like Bob Pechie hasn’t heard them all.

A machinist and long-time alt-energy aficionado, Pechie has designed a tilting tower sturdy enough to support a ten-kilowatt wind turbine. It’s so elegantly balanced it can be raised and lowered by a set of small hydraulic pumps in mere minutes, making it ideal for those seeking easy access to their turbine for maintenance or for locations where extreme weather or bird migration patterns would make occasionally lowering the turbine a necessity. He’s been working on this idea since the early 1990s, but only recently have rising energy prices and fear of climate change inspired a renewed surge of interest in viable fossil fuel alternatives. “From Reagan until the mid-’90s, small wind turbines and solar panels were almost laughable,” says the 55-year-old Connecticut native. “A lot of people thought it was nonsense.”

Not anymore. These days, says Pechie, folks seem downright enthusiastic about his curious-looking towers and the personal energy independence they might offer.

Unlike such large commercial concerns as California’s six-thousand-turbine Altamont Pass installation or the twenty-four-turbine Backbone Mountain wind farm in Western Maryland that Annapolis businessman Wayne Rogers has proposed, the small-scale systems Pechie advocates trace their roots to the father of the light bulb. Decades after he built the nation’s first commercial power station, Thomas Edison touted wind-powered local grids (supplying energy to just a half-dozen homes each) as a long-term solution to the nation’s energy needs.

Soon after the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, Pechie was inspired to take up Edison’s challenge. Then, as now, he was working in a machine shop, fabricating steel parts for the local Frito-Lay factory and other clients. But in his off hours, the self-taught tinkerer began refining the propellers and turbine components that convert wind-generated motion into electricity and testing them at the top of a 112-foot tower in his own backyard. “You have to try an awful lot of things,” says Pechie. “You’ll build a part, install it, and see how it works. That means you either have to take down the turbine or bring the part up. And that gets really time consuming.” The day the inventor climbed his tower fourteen times sparked his dream of a tilt-action alternative.

Like a latter-day trebuchet, the design repurposes the medieval siege engine’s hurling arm as a monopole to support the turbine. A solo operator can raise the propellers to full operating height or lower them to within a few feet of the ground in under two minutes. Unlike other tilt-ups, Pechie’s doesn’t require a vast concrete base or the guywires and Eiffel-tower-style steel lattice that can attract birds: Small concrete footers and a hydraulic pump and counterweight, complemented by a few heavy-duty bolts, stabilize the tower and counteract the power of wind-generated torque.

Pechie thinks his design might be perfect for homeowners. The big problem with existing small residential systems, he says, is that the whole neighborhood has to look at the whirling blades. “To someone who isn’t getting anything out of them and has to give them attention,” he says, “it could be annoying.” With a small tilt-up, the view could be preserved for much of the year. “Sometimes windmills aren’t doing anything,” Pechie says, noting lower average wind speeds during late spring and summer. “You could very easily tilt it down, so it’s not sticking up there shadowing your neighbor’s yard.”

Pechie’s company, Northeast Wind Energy, has now installed a half-dozen working models throughout New England. Last fall, the Cape Cod chapter of the American Lighthouse Foundation placed a Pechie tilt-up at the off-grid Race Point Lighthouse in Provincetown, Massachusetts. “The lighthouse is in the middle of nowhere and I don’t want the turbine out in the winter,” says chapter president Jim Walker, who figures that Pechie’s thirty-foot tower will double the life of their 2.5 kilowatt turbine. “We use it only six months of the year. So we take the propellers off in late autumn and put them back up in April. If they’re turning all winter long in the strong winter winds, it wears things out.” 

Pechie’s most recent installation rises eighty feet above the granite shores of Appledore Island, Maine. A federally protected haven for nesting seabirds—and in the sightline of a century-old resort—Appledore hosts Cornell University’s seasonal Shoals Marine Laboratory and a New England air quality study funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. When scientists wanted to extend data collection into the unmanned winter months, a wind turbine was the most suitable power source. But protecting wildlife was a top priority. “The state wanted to be able to lower this thing if we had problems with the birds,” says Shoals Marine Laboratory Operations Manager Ross Hansen. “This was a perfect design to meet our needs.” An added safety bonus: The lab’s undergraduate interns can reach the 7.5 kilowatt turbine without scaling the equivalent of an eight-story building.

Pechie’s tower also offered a solution for Upper Cape Cod Regional Technical School, where administrators wanted to offer an apprentice-level workshop to install the nation’s first AIRCon ten-kilowatt direct-drive turbine. Maintenance staff and students can remain on terra firma, a plus for an area intent on expanding its alternative energy workforce. “We don’t have a lot of people who like to climb towers,” says Megan Amsler, executive director of Cape & Islands Self-Reliance Corporation and a coordinator of the workshop. “If you have something that tilts to the ground, the liability is less.”

Meanwhile, Bob Pechie is back at the drawing board, streamlining the production process to make his tower more affordable for homeowners. Currently, he custom-builds each one, a process that takes about a month for a three-man team. Off-the-shelf wind towers currently cost about 40 percent of what Pechie charges—yet the inventor figures he’s lost money on every project to date. “There’s always going to be a cheaper tower,” he says. “My vision is to build the wind turbine I feel would put out as much energy as people need and allow them to maintain the machine. I lose a little less with each project, and someday I may break even.”

It would help, he adds, if the prevailing political breezes would start blowing his way. “I’m glad I’ve still got a few years left in me. I’m hoping we get an administration that becomes friendly to wind before I get too old.”

—Sharon Tregaskis





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