Chuck Donaldson is the man who wants to build a windmill right at the top of Millennium Park in West Roxbury. When I first read about his proposal, I wrote NO!!! Donaldson invited me up to the park to try to convince me to support the idea.

Donaldson wants to put a 200-foot wind turbine (125 feet for a 16-foot-diameter tower, topped by a 75-foot blades), at the far end of the park, away from the parking lots, down near a dropoff that goes down toward the Charles, just past the soccer fields. This assumes the winds are right and he gets all the approvals he'd need.

Donaldson, a retired GE engineer, says that point is uniquely situated for wind power - winds coming off the Charles River plain hit the "wall" that is the park (a 120-foot high former landfill), creating an updraft that should pass right where the windmill would go. There are already high-tension power lines running along one side of the park, so it would be easy to feed the electricity into the local grid - to help power the nearby West Roxbury Education Complex and the VA hospital, he says as we stroll along the path that circles the soccer fields at the top of the park.

One of my objections was what the windmill would do to the view - Millennium Park is that rare Boston location where you can get a 360-degree view of the surrounding terrain. Donaldson claims that from the parking lot at the top of the park, the windmill would appear no higher than the Needham radio/TV towers you can see, or something like this image (I took a photo of a Hull windmill and stuck it on a photo from the Millennium Park topmost parking lot):

Doesn't look quite so bad, although obviously, the closer you get the larger the thing will loom. What about kite flying? Donaldson, who makes kites himself - including research kits for the Blue Hill weather observatory - said the blades would turn slowly enough that he doubts a kite would be damaged even if it hit one of the blades, although he said it's possible a blade could cut a kite line.

Now, obviously, Donaldson isn't just going to show up one day with a crane and a windmill. First, he wants to make sure West Roxbury residents agree with the idea. On Sept. 23, he goes before before the West Roxbury Neighborhood Council, an city advisory group (7:30 p.m. at the West Roxbury police station at Centre Street and West Roxbury Parkway). If they say yes, he has to make sure the site would actually work for a windmill. He plans to bring up a balloon and some monitoring equipemt to see what the winds are actually like up above the park. There might be wind eddies or other factors that would rule out a windmill. Even then, he'd probably want to build a 30-foot structure for testing before going to 200 feet.

He says he'd set up a non-profit concern to raise funds and actually build the tower. He'd also have to get permission from the city Parks Department to build the windmill. But not more:

"I don't envision this ever becoming a wind farm," he says.

And once the windmill is up? He'd like to experiment with geothermal - using the heat and methane naturally generated by decades' worth of trash at the site - to make electricity. Ideally, he says, he'd like to cover the "wildflower" side of the park (the slope that goes down toward the canoe-launch road) with solar panels, although he allows people might object to that, so he'd settle for a much smaller solar-panel area. Then there's using the windmill at night, when demand is low, to pump water up from the Charles to "low profile" storage tanks at the top of the park so the water could be released during the day to drive turbines.

But his ultimate project, which he's already begun prototyping at home, is generating electricity with kites. The idea: Take two kites, connected by a single string wound around a turbine. Set them to flying, one higher than the other, and then let the lower one go up higher. The string would turn the turbine, generating electricity. Reverse their positions periodically and repeat ad infinitum.

After spending some time with Donaldson, well, I'd be willing to consider a windmill at the park. He seems sincere and well meaning:

"[Millennium Park] is one of the reasons I've stayed here," the Kentucky native says. "I love this park."

But I'd be very concerned about turning the park into a large green-energy lab. It's amazing that one of the worst places in the city - a giant trash heap - is now a recreational gem, where you can do everything from flying kites to kicking soccer balls to wandering along paths through woods and along the Charles River. Stony Brook Reservation, where parts of a forest have been replaced with a skating rink and baseball field, shows the dangers of nibbling away at green spaces in the city. Perhaps there's a compromise though - somewhere between a great park and an energy farm/laboratory.