North County

Boston-based First Wind announced a 25-year agreement to provide wind-generated power, at cost, to 17 Massachusetts towns, including eight in Central Massachusetts.

North Central Massachusetts is an area that keeps its manufacturing past in full view. Many towns retain nicknames that bring to mind old, dirty factories turning out the kinds of things that are now mostly imported from China. For instance, Winchendon is “Toy Town,” Gardner “Chair City,” and Athol “Tool Town.”

An expert in business revitalization will become Fitchburg's director of economic development and chief marketing officer next week.

A Gardner firm and a cancer research center in Canada have launched a new biotechnology company that hopes to create about a dozen jobs over the next three years.

State tax collections this fiscal year could grow by as much as 4.8 percent, up from the 3 percent growth rate used by lawmakers and the Patrick administration when they built the $34 billion fiscal 2014 budget, according to an updated Department of Revenue estimate.

A local caterer has bought the former Hodges Theater in Devens and the three acres on which it's situated, according to MassDevelopment, which sold the property for $120,000.

National auto parts retailer O'Reilly Auto Parts will be bringing at least 300 employees over the next few years to a recently purchased distribution facility in Devens.

Ayer-based Cambrooke Foods, which provides medically appropriate foods to people with metabolic disorders, announced Wednesday it has formally changed its name to Cambrooke Therapeutics.

Leave it to Devens to become the destination of the much-anticipated film studios that economic development leaders had hoped would come when Massachusetts implemented tax credits designed to lure the film industry. Developers floated plans for other locations, perhaps most notably a $500-million filming facility proposed for Plymouth, known as Plymouth Rock Studios. Unable to come up with the financial backing to move ahead with construction, that plan failed, while others never got off the ground.

Unemployment in Central Massachusetts held fairly steady over the past month but is markedly higher than this point last year.