Antrim Wind, the nine-turbine wind farm on Tuttle Hill and Willard Mountain in Antrim, reached a milestone of six years of operation on Christmas Eve, and it has been 10 years since the project received approval to move forward.
In October and November 2025, the town of Antrim hosted the first public tours of the wind farm, which had been a longstanding goal of the Antrim Select Board. According to Select Board Chair Michael Ott, making the tours happen was challenging because of concerns about safety and security.
“The town is delighted to have people here. It has taken a while to get everything lined up,” he said.
The free tours filled up quickly, with people of all ages from Antrim and surrounding towns jumping at the chance to see the turbines up close.
Ott, who drove hard-hatted residents on a bus tour of the wind farm, pointed out the former High Range Road, now a trail, which was one of Antrim’s major thoroughfares in the 1800s. The road passed one of Antrim’s first schoolhouses, of which only a cellar hole remains.
Ott said the most common questions he hears from Antrim residents are: “Where does the electricity go?” and “Does this project benefit Antrim?”
“A lot of people wonder where the electricity actually goes, and there are two answers to that,” Ott said. “The first answer, on the physics side, which is a little easier to understand, is that the electrons flowing down the wires will go to the closest lightbulb that needs to come on or the closest battery that needs to be recharged. So if you live in Antrim, Hancock, Hillsborough, or maybe Deering, when you flick your light switch on, there is a good chance that some of those electrons are coming from Antrim Wind.”
According to Ott, the answer to “Where does the electricity go?” is that the power generated by the turbines is purchased by two “off-takers.” The first, the New Hampshire Electric Co-op of Northfield, purchases 25% of the power generated; and the second is Mass General Brigham Hospital system in Boston, which buys the remaining 75% of the power.
“All the power from the project, past, present, and future, has already been sold to those off-takers,” Ott said.
What’s in it for Antrim?
The question of how the project benefits Antrim has multiple answers.
“This project helps all residents; it helps the whole area as far as the electrical congestion factor on the power lines,” Ott said. “If there was more electricity produced locally, it would reduce the transmission burden; right now, we have a lot of power coming from Canada. The available capacity on this line was such that we could decrease congestion locally and on the whole grid itself. And of course, it is renewable energy. People really want to get off fossil fuels.”
Select Board member Bob Edwards, who was on the board at the time the project was proposed, feels the Antrim Wind has had an overall benefit to the town.
“From my point of view, the initiative has required very little administrative oversight and has provided a financial benefit to the town. Each project is different, and should another similar wind project be considered for Antrim, I would simply apply what I’ve learned about the wind process and PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) method of taxation since 2008 to a new project,” Edwards said. “The only material, local economic, financial benefit has resulted from PILOT payments to the town.”
As part of their agreement with the town of Antrim, Trans Alta, the owner of the wind farm, pays a PILOT each year.
“The first payment was $333,000 a year. They have donated a total of $2.4 million to the town so far,” Ott said.
The developers also made a one-time payment of $40,000 to mitigate the impact on Gregg Lake’s viewshed.
“Viewshed is a subjective thing,” Ott said. “Some people like the windmills and like the way they look, and some people can’t stand them.”
TransAlta also donates $5,000 annually to the town’s scholarship fund. So far, the company has donated $25,000 to the fund.
On the downside: wildlife, noise, aircraft and ‘sun flicker’
On the fall tours, Ott discussed the wind farm’s safety and mitigation features, which address issues around wildlife, noise, shadows and aircraft.
On the central peak of Tuttle Hill, a meteorological tower measures wind speed and direction and houses a Harrier radar, which scans for aircraft in the vicinity of the turbines. If the radar detects aircraft, an FAA-licensed Aircraft Detection Lighting System activates warning lights on four towers and the meteorological tower. The red lights, which blink in unison, stay on until the aircraft is out of range.
Antrim Wind was the first site in the United States to be licensed for such a lighting system.
“Someone else got their system online first, but this was the first to be approved,” Ott said. “They decided this was a good site” for that type of lighting system.
Ott said at one point, a malfunction caused the lights to stay on all night.
“For 66 days, lights stayed on from dusk to dawn, but that finally got resolved,” he said.
The environmental hazards of windmills include the potential danger to birds and bats. On one tour, a guest asked Ott “if the operators were counting dead birds,” to which he said that the project has a mortality study to monitor the impact of the blades on birds and bats.
“At first we had a problem with bats, and it took two years of studying the bats to get the data we needed,” Ott said. “The turbines now have a wildlife protection mode; when the wind goes below a certain speed at night, they shut down.”
Ott said that during the study, the turbines went from 34 to 36 bat strikes in the first two years to just two bat strikes in the last two years.
“Bird strikes are also very low,” Ott said.
He noted that other than the security gate at the bottom of the access road, there are no fences around the turbines.
“Wildlife can freely move in and around the project,” Ott said.
Antrim Wind is also required to have mitigation measures in effect to reduce shadow flicker, or the effect of the blades rotating between the sun and a residence, casting shadows.
“People can find that annoying if they’re sitting in their house and every seven seconds a blade goes across the sun and they get a black flash,” Ott said. “What we have to control that is Lidar box, which measures cloud cover. If there are no clouds, the laser registers that shadow flicker might be a problem, so towers 1 through 4 will shut down so the shadow won’t go across a receptor.”
The license limit for shadow flicker is 8 hours a year.
“We’ve never gotten more than seven hours for one receptor,” Ott said.
The majority of complaints around the wind farm since its inception have been around noise. Ott acknowledges that any wind project can be controversial.
“There are a lot of mixed emotions when it comes to the development of New England ridges. At what point do the rights and privileges of surrounding people come at the cost of a greater good for the town or the surrounding region, and for the environment? That is a question that is very, very difficult to answer,” Ott said.
Why Antrim?
According to Ott, the original developers of Antrim Wind, Eolian Renewable Energy and Walden Green Energy, chose the location for the wind farm for convenient access to Route 9, for the proximity to electrical transmission lines, and because of the available wind on the hill.
“It’s easy to get equipment in here, and it’s close proximity to the L163 115,000 volt transmission line, which has excess capacity for power. That was a big reason,” he said.
Ott also owns a portion of the land leased by the wind farm, and coincidentally, works for Siemens Energy, the manufacturer of the turbines. He was not on the Select Board at the time the project was proposed or constructed.
“I moved here in 2005, and I was first approached about leasing land to the wind farm in 2009,” Ott said.
Because the road up Tuttle Hill is too steep and narrow to accommodate the crane, which was needed to construct the turbines, the crane was brought in on trucks, assembled at the base of the first tower, and then driven along the ridge to assemble each of the turbines. After the turbines were completed, the crane was disassembled and hauled back down.
“That’s why the access road is wider at the top,” Ott said.
The land on Tuttle Hill is privately owned by Ott, Greatwoods LLC, Paul Whittemore, and the Whittemore Trust.
“All the towers and the buildings in the project are on land owned by the landowners,” Ott said. “All the retained rights are still with the landowners, they are still logging, and the land is still completely usable.”
The Hancock-based Harris Center for Conservation Education holds the conservation easement for 750 acres of the ridge, while the New England Forestry Foundation holds the remaining 250 acres.
While the total leased area of the project is 1870 acres, according to Ott, more than 1000 of those acres are in conservation. Only about 55 acres were disturbed during construction, and less than 12 acres are currently in use by the wind farm.
A history of controversy
From the first submitted proposal of the project in 2012, Antrim Wind has had supporters and detractors. Original developers Eolian Renewable Energy and Walden Green Energy’s initial proposal for Antrim Wind was denied by the state’s Site Evaluation Committee due to concerns about the aesthetic impact and the effect on the natural beauty of the region, particularly at Willard Pond and Gregg Lake. Some turbines can be seen from each lake.
The project also met with stiff resistance from various local stakeholders, including abutters, homeowners on Gregg Lake and surrounding areas, the Harris Center for Conservation Education, the Nature Conservancy, and New Hampshire Audubon — which owns the de-Pierrefru-Willard Pond Bird Sanctuary — and the Stoddard Conservation Commission. Some homeowners said the turbines would destroy their view, and others claimed, once the turbines were operational, that the noise disrupted their sleep and mental health.
In 2016, 30 abutters, neighbors and Antrim residents testified at a court hearing in Concord both in opposition to and in favor of the wind farm. Detractors raised concerns about wildlife, noise, and the impact on the viewshed, while supporters advocated for green energy and a move away from fossil fuels and toward locally generated power.
The SEC approved the second proposal for Antrim Wind in March 2017 after the developer made modifications to the project, which included eliminating the westernmost turbine and reducing the height of the ninth tower by 42 feet. Construction on Antrim Wind began in July 2018.
Antrim Wind is now owned by a subsidiary of TransAlta, a Canadian company that operates more than 20 wind farms and 900 turbines across Canada, the United States and Australia.
In 2022, a group of abutters sued the state’s Site Evaluation Committee, which handles noise complaints about wind farms, alleging the committee unlawfully allowed for interpretation of the rules around noise limitations for the Antrim Wind project. The neighbors alleged that the noise from the wind farm regularly exceeds the project’s license limit, which is 45 decibels during the daytime and 40 decibels at night (or 5 decibels above background at anytime), and that the SEC measured sound levels averaged over a period of time instead of peak sound readings.
At least one plaintiff in the case stated that the sound of the turbines was like a “jet engine,” and many said the turbines had significantly impacted their quality of life.
The plaintiffs, who were not seeking a financial settlement in the lawsuit, asked the court to order the SEC to make rules that establish a shorter time interval for assessing the compliance of noise requirements of wind energy facilities rather than using a longer-averaged decibel level. According to the minutes of the SEC, the committee has not changed its policy of using averages to determine decibel sound, and the investigation was formally closed in March 2024.
Ott, whose home is the closest residence to the wind farm, says he does hear the turbines “fairly regularly,” but says the noise level varies constantly due to weather, turbine direction, and wind speed. The maximum speed for turbines is 15.5 revolutions per minute RPMs, and at full speed, the tip of each turbine blade is 202 miles per hour.
“The blades are identical to owl’s wings, because owls fly silently,” Ott said. “They actually turn to reduce the sound; it increases efficiently and decreases sound dramatically.”
Residents who wish to file a noise complaint with the town can do so on the town website or call the town offices.
Ott said as far as he knows, the town has not had a noise complaint for two years, and there is no pending litigation against the wind farm.
‘It all goes away’
To receive permission to build the wind farm, the developer agreed to decommission and remove the project in 2059, at which point the property will revert to undeveloped conservation land.
“I won’t be around then, but when it happens, the crane will have to come back up and take all the turbines down,” Ott said. “The decommissioning is already funded and bonded.”
In 2039, Antrim Wind has the option to upgrade or repower the turbines if needed, or the company can continue to operate them with the existing equipment.
On a personal level, Ott said he feels the required decommissioning of the project is short-sighted, as he feels the project will continue to provide more benefit than harm.
“If the wind resources are good for wind power today, they will likely be good to continue to produce power in the future,” he said. “It’s a good thing for the town, and it’s a good for the planet. It’s kind of too bad it’s all going to go away.”
