Turbine dollars tempt selectmen in Wellfleet - Truro, MA - Wicked Local Truro

WELLFLEET - With just one commercial wind turbine, the town could bring in $10.4 million dollars over 20 years and not have to spend a cent to power its municipal buildings.

That was the message that Jim Sexton and other members of the alternative energy committee delivered to selectmen last Tuesday. The selectmen reacted with applause and exclamations.

"This is one of the most exciting things we’ve done in a long time," Selectman Ira Wood said.

Selectman Mike May, who chairs the alternative energy committee, explained that that committee, with the financial help of the Massachusetts Technology Commission, put up a 160-foot test tower at White Crest Beach which generated 15,000 samples of wind flow over a one-year period.

Those samples recently resulted in a feasibility report from Black & Veech, an engineering company, concluding that the site is ideal for a wind turbine.

May, after the meeting, said the dollar figures will probably change. But the point that the engineers made in the feasibility report was that "this will be very lucrative for Wellfleet."

P.T. Barnum: Biography from Answers.com

A nineteenth-century American showman known for his circus, “The Greatest Show on Earth.” His sideshows were particularly notable, even though many of the “freaks” he advertised were hoaxes. After Barnum's death, his circus was absorbed into the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

# According to a famous story, when someone pointed out that his customers had reason to be angry because freaks in his show were fakes, Barnum replied, “There's a sucker born every minute.”