Cleveland Welcomes Largest Wind Turbine in North America

While you were sleeping off your Easter sugar high, the Port of Cleveland was celebrating a first for our city: a Kenersys Europe GmbH K100 2.5 Mega-Watt wind turbine. Monday morning the blades and nacelle, or the enclosed section atop the tower that holds the generator and other mechanisms, arrived via ship. Thanks to a loan from Cuyahoga County, the turbine will be installed at The Lincoln Electric Company in Euclid. Here’s how the monumental new wind turbine stacks up:

• From its base to the tip of the blade, it’s 443 feet tall. That’s 23 feet taller than Cedar Point's Top Thrill Dragster.
• Each of the three blades are 165 feet long. Stacked end to end, they’d be taller than Terminal Tower.
• The turbine is about three times taller than the 147-foot wind turbine at the Great Lakes Science Center.
• Our new wind turbine is the largest in North America, according to County Prosecutor William D. Mason, Chairman of the Great Lakes Energy Development Task Force.

Activist Ed Hauser dies

Local activist Ed Hauser, who pushed doggedly to make the beautiful, underappreciated Whiskey Island a county park, and who attended countless government meetings, politely but stubbornly asking questions no one else was asking, died Friday of a heart attack. He was 47.

Cleveland loses Hauser at an awful time. He was asking important questions about two huge public projects that may each cost $500 million: the medical mart/convention center and the port relocation.

In our May issue, columnist Michael D. Roberts wrote admiringly, "Hauser is a pain — a persistent, nagging, unyielding pain. On the medical scale of one to 10, he would rate a 10. What makes him so painful is that he challenges the way the town and its dysfunctional government work."