LIMESTONE, Maine — Altaeros Energies, a Boston-area tech company with connections to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will be leasing two buildings on the former Loring Air Force base to test its new helium-filled, tethered platform for an electricity producing turbine.
“Altaeros is mostly MIT graduates,” LDA President and CEO Carl Flora told the board members during their June 21 meeting. “They’ve formed a company that has developed an airborne wind turbine housed in a helium jacket that’s tethered and can be raised to the sky where the available wind is much higher. The power is fed through the tether line and into the grid, wherever that may be.”
The company will use the west bay of the tactical alert hangar along with an adjacent office building for construction and testing, Flora said. The recently authorized agreement would allow Altaeros to begin shipping equipment in June, build in July, test the tethered platform in August, and move out by the end of September.
Flora says the tech company has been in contact with the Federal Aviation Administration to work out all the necessary safety precautions and guidelines for flying and testing the device on the site.
Specifically, Altaeros will be leasing the two buildings for four months, with a fixed rent of $9,000. According to the agreement, the company also will cover electricity costs while the LDA will supply water and sewer services “in reasonable quantities” at no cost to Altaeros.
In 2012, Altaeros utilized Limestone’s former Air Force base to test an airborne wind turbine prototype, claiming that it harnessed strong winds up to 350 feet high which “produce over twice the power of traditional wind turbines.”
“They’ve been here a couple different times,” Flora said. “Now they’ve taken a slightly different twist on same technology and want this to be an elevated helium-filled platform. It sounds like it’s a much bigger device.”
“Is this different from the one that was here a few years back,” board member Doug Damon asked, “where it was suspended from a balloon and generated a miniscule amount of electricity?”
“I’m not sure what it generated for electricity,” Flora said, “but the idea is that it could generate more in the air than on the ground. This is a different twist on the [earlier turbine].”
