Raymond Masucci

As the site for New York City’s first free-standing wind-power generating turbine, Staten Island is logical enough in its way. The buildings there are relatively low, and it has plenty of unobstructed shoreline and hills from which to grab wind coming off the water.

As such, the borough’s vast, dormant landfill, Fresh Kills, has long been named as a possible site for a wind farm. Last August, the borough president, James P. Molinaro, proposed such an operation, with seven turbines mounted on 400-foot towers.

It would generate enough electricity, he said, to power 5,000 homes.

But the Fresh Kills proposal, should it come to pass, would not have the first wind turbines in the city, or even on Staten Island. That honor — for free-standing windmills, anyway, connected to the city’s power grid with Con Edison’s permission — goes to a much smaller project, in a muddy corner of a half-built 55-and-over condominium project on the island’s southwest shore by the Outerbridge Crossing.

That is where Ray Masucci, the developer behind the Tides at Charleston, has erected a turbine on a 45-foot-tall tower to run the community’s streetlights and sewage system. I paid it a visit for this Sunday’s Dispatches feature in The City section.

The turbine, the existence of which was first reported in The Staten Island Advance, was approved by Con Edison for connection with the local power grid on Feb. 9, said Margarett Jolly, a spokeswoman for the utility. It was erected simultaneously with — but approved just before — a set of roof-mounted turbines at an apartment building in the South Bronx, Ms. Jolly said.

Some wiggle room is necessary to call the Staten Island turbine the first of its kind in the city. Ms. Jolly said that for reasons of safety and grid stability, Con Edison must be notified, and its approval sought, whenever wind power is used at a building or operation that is also connected to Con Edison’s power. Still, she said, not everyone remembers to ask.

Moreover, there are cases in which permission is not necessary, such as where the turbine is part of a closed system, disconnected from the grid, as with a Ricoh billboard in Times Square that is being powered entirely by wind and the sun.

Finally, there are cases like that of the rooftop turbine in the East Village, erected in the 1970s atop a reclaimed gutted tenement building and later connected to the grid without Con Edison’s permission. It generated modest power before it broke in a hurricane and was later dismantled.

At any rate, Ms. Jolly said Mr. Masucci’s turbine was the first and only free-standing turbine in the city, as far as Con Edison knows.

All that being said, it is something to see. It is made of lightweight molded fiberglass, aluminum and plastic, and it rotates on its own to point in the right direction, away from the wind. On a gusty day, of which Mr. Masucci said there are many on the southwestern edge of the island, it emits a quiet whining sound as its blades spin. If the wind is too high and the turbine starts to spin too fast, it shuts down automatically before restarting later.

Mr. Masucci, who is now an authorized distributor for the turbine’s manufacturer, Southwest Power, is hoping to sell similar models to businesses and private homes in the area. Ms. Jolly said that for Con Edison’s part, the utility has overcome much of its initial uneasiness about wind turbines connecting to the grid.

It is now commonplace, she said, for them to be fitted with bidirectional meters, which allow them to feed surplus energy into the larger system, essentially selling it back to the power company. Even though small turbines, like those in Staten Island and the Bronx, do not put much wattage into the grid, there were still some worries at Con Edison about the process disrupting the system.

“We’ve been cautious and have been looking at them case by case,” Ms. Jolly said. Still, she added, now that the utility has had more experience with the technology: “We’re more comfortable now with what it is and isn’t. Up to a certain threshold, we’ve done some studies that say we’re O.K.”