Just before lunch, Carter and I motor over to White Island in one of our aging zodiacs. The low tide has fully exposed the craggy reef known as The Devil's Back, which makes surges at the landing place especially unpredictable. Clambering through the surf, we tie off our boat, walk up a steel ramp to the narrow neck between White Island and Seavey's Island, and turn left onto the short path to the Lighthouse Keeper's House. Later this spring and throughout the summer, our team for the White Island Tern Restoration Project will live here to protect and monitor the largest tern colony in southern New England. But today there are no terns and few sounds other than water surging in the rocks and the drone of the foghorn at the base of the White Island Light.
What I love best about White Island is the lighthouse. It was built before the Civil War, when whale oil lit its beacon. You can still see the doorways and niches that accommodated the barrels. Twentieth-century lamps were powered by electricity from diesel powered generators, when burning fuel was the only practical way to generate electricity on a small island beyond the reach of undersea power cables. White Island's generators went obsolete after solar panels and storage batteries became adequate to power incandescent lamps. The only problem was that it took massive arrays of panels to power such systems, and such arrays are pretty good sails. A powerful nor'easter blew away White Island's solar panels in April 2007. So the Coast Guard replaced the lamp with an array of LED’s that uses a small fraction of the power formerly required, involving just a few small panels and storage batteries. The new system produces a brilliant, cold, white light, but I'm told that it has nothing like the brilliance of the White Island Light in those decades of diesel-powered lamps.
As Carter and I approach the house, Tom Johnson and Kevin Jerram emerge into bright sunshine from its attached generator room. The diesel generators, relics from the decades when they powered the White Island Light, stand there rusting in some sort of quiet testimony to the end of the age of oil. The May sunshine is a good antidote to that depressing room. Tom and Kevin are here to install two new 175W solar panels and the inverters and batteries needed to store and provide daily power for our summer program. These replace car batteries connected by jumper cables and a ramshackle set of panels that powered our tern project for the past three years. We need electricity on White Island for the same reasons that people need it everywhere, but electrical power is especially significant for people living for a season on a small isolated island, for its absence means no laptops, no internet, no cell phones, no radios, and crummy food – let alone no fans for the composting toilets.
So for us it is no small achievement to have this new and reliable solar system installed and operational. Determined (and often unpaid) people hauled its components from small rubber boats over the rocky intertidal, and through that surge created by The Devil's Back. Tom shows us the first live circuit, which powers kitchen appliances and overhead lighting, and he will activate more circuits this afternoon. Shortly afterward, our crews will be dispatched at high tide to remove old batteries, rust, and relics, but much remains to be done before all traces of fossil-fuel-based electricity are eliminated from White Island. Perhaps such demonstrably sustainable approaches to power will catch the interest of the country at large, so that everyone will install solar and wind-power systems and will learn the practical physics of DC and AC power, what an inverter does, and how storage batteries and fuel cells work. But I worry whether we as a people will have the will to make this necessary conversion, especially as we are working directly across the six miles of Bigelow Bight from the mainland's Seabrook Station. The power Seabrook makes is definitely not too cheap to meter, and tens of millions of lights will burn in New England tonight.
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