Medford officials are hoping for a lot of those days in the future. That’s because the city is in the process of commissioning a wind turbine at the John J. McGlynn Sr. Elementary and Middle School.

The site is just along the highway and the Mystic River near the Route 16 exit and visible to thousands of people using the road.

The turbine’s hub is 131 feet high and its three blades are 34 feet long. It was made by Northern Power of Barre, Vt., and is expected to generate 170,000 kilowatt hours, or about $25,000 worth of electricity per year. That’s about 10 percent of the school’s electricity bill, said Patty Barry, director of the city’s energy and environment office.

Barry and Mayor Michael J. McGlynn showed the turbine to a reporter yesterday, a day after the official ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Barry said the project was just one of a number of environmental initiatives the city has undertaken during the mayor’s tenure, including the installation of a solar power system on City Hall, solar lighting at Hormel Stadium, and the use of town vehicles powered by alternative fuels.

One project led to the next, McGlynn said. “The one thing about the environment, it’s addictive . . . because the more you do the more you want to do,” he said.

One of the key reasons for installing the turbine was to create awareness of alternative energy among the children at the schools, he said.

Another benefit of the project, McGlynn said, will be to get more name recognition for the city.

“Part of the thought process was that we wanted to build a landmark here in the city. So pretty soon, you’ll be hearing on the radio that ‘Traffic is backed up to the turbine in Medford,’ ” he said.

Maureen McCracken, director of marketing at Northern Power, said the company’s turbines can spin and make electricity in winds as slow as 6 mph and as fast as 56 miles per hour.

The Medford turbine has already put some power onto the grid, though it hasn’t been cleared for unattended operation. It’s expected to be fully operational at the end of next week.

The Globe reported Thursday that Governor Deval Patrick’s lofty goals of making the state a leader in energy and environmental policy may be endangered by the stumbling economy, which has produced massive budget deficits.

To reach the state’s goal of 2,000 megawatts produced by wind power by 2020, the state would have to increase generating capacity more than 300 times.

But the $644,000 Medford project, which benefited from a number of major grants, has made it under the wire.

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When one hears the phrase “free energy device”, one might be hearing about one of several different concepts. This might mean a device for collecting and transmitting energy from some source that orthodox science does not recognize; a device which collects energy at absolutely no cost; or an example of the legendary perpetual motion machine. Needless to say, a perpetual motion machine—a machine which drives itself, forever, once turned on, therefore needing no energy input ever again and never running out of energy—is impossible. However, it is not so simple to say that a new technology for harnessing the energy “floating” in the atmosphere is impossible. New technologies replace old ones all the time with abilities that had just been “impossible”. Harnessing the power of the atom for providing huge amounts of energy was “impossible” until the 1940s. Flying human beings were an “impossible” thing until the turn of the 20th century and the Wright Brothers’ flight.

The biggest claim of the proponents of “free” energy is that enormous amounts of energy can be drawn from the Zero Point Field. This is a quantum mechanical state of matter for a defined system which is attained when the system is at the lowest possible energy state that it can be in. This is called the “ground state” of the system. Zero Point Energy (ZPE) is sometimes referred to as “residual” energy and it was first proposed to be usable as an alternative form of energy way back in 1913 by Otto Stern and Albert Einstein. It is also referred to as “vacuum energy” in studies of quantum mechanics, and it is supposed to represent the energy of totally empty space. This energy field within the vacuum has been likened to the froth at the base of a waterfall by one of the principal researchers into and proponents of Hal Puthof. Puthof also explains, the term ‘zero-point’ simply means that if the universe were cooled down to absolute zero where all thermal agitation effects would be frozen out, this energy would still remain. What is not as well known, however, even among practicing physicists, are all the implications that derive from this known aspect o quantum physics. However, there are a group of physicists—myself and colleagues at several research labs and universities—who are examining the details, we ask such questions as whether it might be possible to ‘mine’ this reservoir of energy for use as an alternative energy source, or whether this background energy field might be responsible for inertia and gravity. These questions are of interest because it is known that this energy can be manipulated, and therefore there is the possibility that the control of this energy, and possibly inertia and gravity, might yield to engineering solutions. Some progress has been made in a subcategory of this field (cavity quantum electrodynamics) with regard to controlling the emission rates of excited atoms and molecules, of interest in laser research and elsewhere.

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