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The wind power industry is predicting massive layoffs and stalled or abandoned projects after a deal to renew a tax credit failed Thursday in Washington. The move is expected to have major ramifications in states such as Illinois, where 13,892 megawatts of planned wind projects — enough to power 3.3 million homes per year — are seeking to be connected to the electric grid. Many of those projects will be abandoned or significantly delayed without federal subsidies. The state is home to more than 150 companies that support the wind industry. At least 67 of those make turbines or components...

Hopes that a near-term extension of the production tax credit (PTC) for wind power would be included in legislation to extend the payroll tax cuts through the remainder of this year are nearly extinguished, as NAW has learned that congressional leaders have reached a tentative framework agreement on the payroll tax cut - but it does not contain a PTC extension. A House-Senate conference committee is expected to approve the deal, which will then go to the House and Senate as soon as today. Sources, who wished to remain anonymous, told NAW that both legislative bodies are expected to quickly...

...I want to believe in alt power, because sun and wind are free -- just as petroleum is free. It's only the extraction and distribution that cost...

Egypt currently has a total electricity capacity of about 23,500 megawatts, which the government hopes to increase to 58,000 megawatts by 2027. A prime potential element in increasing this electrical output? Renewables. One might think, given Egypt’s climate, solar? Wrong again – wind power, which currently contributes less than 1 percent to Egypt’s energy mix. In 2003 Egypt had its wind potential assessed and published a wind atlas, which found that with wind speeds of 7-10 meters per second, almost the entire nation was ideal for wind power installations, with the country’s best areas being along the Gulf of Suez...

For decades, electric companies have swung into emergency mode when demand soars on blistering hot days, appealing to households to use less power. But with the rise of wind energy, utilities in the Pacific Northwest are sometimes dealing with the opposite: moments when there is too much electricity for the grid to soak up. So in a novel pilot project, they have recruited consumers to draw in excess electricity when that happens, storing it in a basement water heater or a space heater outfitted by the utility. The effort is rooted in some brushes with danger. In June 2010, for...

BOSTON (AP) -- A federal appeals court on Friday overturned the Federal Aviation Administration's ruling that Cape Wind's turbines present no danger for local air traffic. The decision could further delay construction of the wind farm first proposed a decade ago. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said the FAA misread its own rules when assessing Cape Wind, which aims to be the nation's first offshore wind farm. The court said the FAA did not adequately determine whether Cape Wind's 130 turbines - each 440-feet tall - would pose a danger to pilots relying on sight...

Windmills to shut at night following demise of rare batKathy Mellott - The Tribune-Democrat October 17, 2011 LILLY — Night operation of the windmills in the North Allegheny Windpower Project has been halted following discovery of a dead Indiana bat under one of the turbines, an official with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Monday. The finding marks only the second location where an Indiana bat has been found dead under a wind turbine. Two Indiana bats were found under turbines in the Mid-west, said Clint Riley, supervisor for Fish and Wildlife’s Pennsylvania field office. “While finding the dead...

You may have gotten wind of the seven North Dakota oil companies recently charged in federal court with the deaths of 28 migratory birds. The birds allegedly landed in oil waste pits in western North Dakota last spring; the maximum penalty for each charge under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act is six months in prison and a $15,000 fine, the AP said. But did you know that wind-power companies are responsible for more than 400,000 bird deaths annually, and not one has faced a single charge? The Wall Street Journal knows it, opining yesterday that the prosecutions are “bird-brained,” especially...

Our ever-campaigning president heads off to a fundraiser held by a politically connected businessman whose company took a $100 million stimulus tax credit. Solyndra didn't stop pay-for-play the "Chicago Way."

Scandal: Our ever-campaigning president heads off to a fundraiser held by a politically connected businessman whose company took a $100 million stimulus tax credit. Solyndra didn't stop pay-for-play the "Chicago Way." Tone-deaf somehow does not seem adequate to describe President Obama's silent indifference to the Solyndra scandal of his making as he rushes off to another fundraiser, a $25,000 per person affair in Missouri on Oct. 4 organized by another beneficiary of our stimulus tax dollars. Tom Carnahan, of the Missouri Carnahans, arguably that state's most prominent political family, is listed on President Obama's campaign website as a host of...

These pointless monstrosities will continue to proliferate until the Government sees sense. Three separate news items on the same day last week reflected three different aspects of what is fast becoming a full-scale disaster bearing down on Britain. The first item was a picture in The Daily Telegraph showing two little children forlornly holding a banner reading “E.On Hands Off Winwick”. This concerned a battle to prevent a tiny Northamptonshire village from being dwarfed by seven 410-foot wind turbines, each higher than Salisbury Cathedral, to be built nearby by a giant German-owned electricity firm. The 40 residents, it was reported,...

General Electric, the U.S.-based industrial giant and leading manufacturer of wind-power turbines, is scaling back efforts to expand its presence in the offshore wind power market. The rationale: there is no meaningful offshore wind market to speak of – at least not yet. Given slower-than-expected industry growth, the offshore market may not mature as rapidly as many wind boosters once believed.

As California attempts to divorce itself from fossil-fueled electricity, it may be trading one environmental sin for another -- although you don't hear state officials admitting it. Wind power is the fastest growing component in the state's green energy portfolio, but wildlife advocates say the marriage has an unintended consequence: dead birds, including protected species of eagles, hawks and owls. "The cumulative impacts are huge," said Shawn Smallwood, one of the few recognized experts studying the impact of wind farms on migratory birds. "It is not inconceivable to me that we could reduce golden eagle populations by a great deal,...

The Wind-Energy MythThe claims for this "green" source of energy wither in the Texas heat. Hot? Don’t count on wind energy to cool you down. That’s the lesson emerging from the stifling heat wave that’s hammering Texas. Over the past week or so, Texans have been consuming record-breaking quantities of electricity, and ERCOT, the state’s grid operator, has warned of rolling blackouts if customers don’t reduce their consumption.  Texas has 10,135 megawatts of installed wind-generation capacity. That’s nearly three times as much as any other state. But during three sweltering days last week, when the state set new records for...

Federal authorities are investigating the deaths of at least six golden eagles at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's Pine Tree Wind Project in the Tehachapi Mountains, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Tuesday. So far, no wind-energy company has been prosecuted by federal wildlife authorities in connection with the death of birds protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. A prosecution in the Pine Tree case could cause some rethinking and redesigning of this booming alternative energy source. Facilities elsewhere also have been under scrutiny, according to a...

An investigative report in the L.A. Times exposes California’s solar and wind power economy, and for good reason. Key quotes include: > Accidents involving wind turbines alone have tripled in the last decade > Technicians have fallen hundreds of feet; others have been crushed by wayward parts or trapped in twisting machinery > Electrical explosions last year left a worker in Illinois with third-degree burns and two others in San Diego County with similar injuries > Workers could asphyxiate inside turbine enclosures or inhale harmful gases and vapors when buffing and resurfacing blades, the Department of Labor cautions > Wind...

Hard to believe we live in a world where $287,000 per stimulous job would look like a good deal. Thankfully, Obamanomics is full of surprises. A RedState post today highlights a Spain-based company Iberdrola is building windmills in New Hampshire for $100 million with a little help from the US taxpayer to the tune of $34 million. But wait there more…the “green jobs” created (or saved) for the construction of the windmills are going to go to the Spain-based Iberdrola Engineering Construction company. Is it to quixotic to expect that the jobs created by tax credits go to American workers?

Because wind does not blow all the time, wind power is an “intermittent” technology that needs other power as back-up to ensure that the lights stay on. Currently, wind capacity is backed up by existing fossil fuel capacity (natural gas or coal), but Britain has determined that it will need an additional 17 natural-gas powered plants to keep the lights on by 2020. The generators that will be used when the wind does not blow will cost UK consumers 10 billion pounds.[i] To cover the cost of this additional standby capacity, the utility companies are asking for capacity paymentsthat will...

Chancellor Merkel is pinning her hopes on an expansion of wind power Germany's dramatic rethink over nuclear power has thrown up new problems, as the consequences of a retreat from atomic technology emerge. Just after Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster in March, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a review of energy policy and ordered Germany's oldest reactors to be shut down immediately, and perhaps permanently. Only a few months earlier, she had decided to keep the reactors running past their original shutdown dates. But only now comes the hard bit. Power companies have warned of higher prices because of the shutdown; Germany...

Lawmakers in Oregon, Washington, Montana and California set the table by establishing aggressive mandates for renewable power that "ratchet higher" over the next 15 years. Oregon's large utilities are required "mandated" at rate payer expense" to serve 5 percent of their demand with "renewable" this year, increasing to 25 percent by 2025. California's standard is 33 percent by 2020, and Washington's is 15 percent by 2020.

Pursuing a new green energy economy in the United Kingdom has led to lost jobs and higher energy prices. President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and other political luminaries such as Arnold Schwarzenegger promise us a bright green future, but let’s look at how things have worked out in Europe, where green energy has been tested extensively. Does green energy lead to green jobs? This article is the second in a series that will look Europe’s experience. This time, we focus on the United Kingdom.Our Commonwealth cousins across the pond have also embraced the “green power...

Wind energy took another blow—this time in Massachusetts. Wind One is the 400-foot-tall wind turbine owned by the town of Falmouth, on the southwestern tip of Cape Cod. The residents of Falmouth initially welcomed Wind One as a symbol of green energy and a handy way to keep local taxes down. Electricity generated by the turbine would be used to power the municipality’s infrastructure, thus shaving about $400,000 a year off its utility costs. Installed in the spring of 2010 at a cost of $5.1 million (with some $3 million derived through grants, government kickbacks, and credits), the huge turbine...

This is what a clean energy future looks like, for an entire Country, in this case Australia. This is a scenario that uses actual figures and recent real time data. Currently the U.S. has 41,000MW of Nameplate Capacity for all wind towers. Here in Australia, there is that same Nameplate Capacity for every electrical power plant that emits Carbon Dioxide, and that's black and brown coal, natural gas, and oil derivatives. Transpose that exact wind total to Australia, and there are no CO2 emissions. However, the actual power delivered to consumers amounts to only one third of the current existing...

Power: A study of renewable energy in Scotland shows that for every job created in the alternative energy sector, almost four jobs are lost in the rest of the economy. We've seen this movie before. Not only has the sun set on the British Empire, but the promise of wind apparently is deserting it as well. A new study called "Worth The Candle?" by the consulting firm Verso Economics confirms the experience of Spain and other countries: The creation of "green" jobs destroys other jobs through the diversion of resources and the denial of abundant sources of fossil fuel energy....

America is running out of natural gas. Prices will soar, making imported liquefied natural gas (LNG) and T Boone Pickens’ wind farm plan practical, affordable and inevitable. That was then. Barely two years later, America (and the world) are tapping vast, previously undreamed-of energy riches – as drillers discover how to produce gas from shale, coal and tight sandstone formations, at reasonable cost. They do it by pumping a water, sand and proprietary chemical mixture into rocks under very high pressure, fracturing or “fracking” the formations, and keeping the cracks open, to yield trapped methane. Within a year, US recoverable...

Here’s the story: “We can’t control the weather,” Julie Vitek said in an interview from company headquarters in Houston, Texas. “We’re looking to see if we can cope with it more effectively, through the testing of a couple of techniques.”She says the conditions in northern New Brunswick have wreaked havoc on the wind farm this winter.“For us, cold and dry weather is good and that’s what’s typical in the region. Cold and wet weather can be a problem without any warmer days to prompt thawing, which has been the case this year.“This weather pattern has been particularly challenging.”Full article here...

Times of international turmoil are great moments for domestic governments to make important announcements they don’t want to be noticed. Especially if the announcement involves a sudden reversal in policy that could seriously embarrass the government. So Friday afternoon was an ideal time for Ontario’s Liberal government to take a big chunk of its alternative energy program and chuck it overboard. .. After years of touting wind projects as a critical piece of the alternative energy puzzle, the government let slip — very quietly — that offshore wind projects are no longer part of the game plan. Turns out there...

Power: Tilting once again at windmills, the Interior Department has announced that it's fast-tracking wind farms off four Atlantic states. Now, if they were oil rigs, we might actually get some real energy. While vast reserves of oil and natural gas lie undeveloped off both coasts and in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, barred from development by federal edict for the next seven years, the obsessive pursuit of green energy continued on Monday. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, architects of the economy-killing administration war on fossil fuels, said the Obama administration would speed the development of...

As was discussed on the February 2nd edition of Pratt on Texas, the ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) rolling blackouts across the state could have been prevented with better planning and policy. Electrical engineer, Ross Aten, joined Robert Pratt to talk about how too many coal and natural gas power plants within ERCOT were taken offline for maintenance. Ross also explained that if you, ‘ran the numbers’, the only way ERCOT could have met peak winter demand usage is if wind energy across the state was producing at significant totals. However, because of the ice storm and lack of...

Wind turbines wring energy out of a free-flowing fuel ­supply that may be losing some of its punch. Surface winds appear to be weakening across the Northern Hemisphere, including in the United States, Western Europe, and China—the world's top three markets for wind power. And climate change threatens to weaken them further during this century as faster warming over northern ­latitudes trims the temperature gradients that energize airflows.

Amid the maelstrom of controversy over the nation’s first offshore wind farm, one truth is as plain as the proposed 440-foot turbines in Nantucket Sound are tall: Its energy will be very expensive. That’s not just compared with power from coal and natural gas, but with renewable power from other sources. Once the 130 turbines begin rotating, the energy produced will cost up to 50 percent more than energy today from some land-based wind farms and twice as much as some hydroelectric dams. The cost will increase customers’ monthly electric bills about 2 percent, and for many that is too...

VINALHAVEN, Me. — Like nearly all of the residents on this island in Penobscot Bay, Art Lindgren and his wife, Cheryl, celebrated the arrival of three giant wind turbines late last year. That was before they were turned on.“In the first 10 minutes, our jaws dropped to the ground,” Mr. Lindgren said. “Nobody in the area could believe it. They were so loud.” Now, the Lindgrens, along with a dozen or so neighbors living less than a mile from the $15 million wind facility here, say the industrial whoosh-and-whoop of the 123-foot blades is making life in this otherwise tranquil...

VINALHAVEN, Maine — Like nearly all of the residents on this island in Penobscot Bay, Art Lindgren and his wife, Cheryl, celebrated the arrival of three giant wind turbines late last year. That was before they were turned on. “In the first 10 minutes, our jaws dropped to the ground,” Mr. Lindgren said. “Nobody in the area could believe it. They were so loud.” Lawsuits and complaints about turbine noise, vibrations and subsequent lost property value have cropped up in Illinois, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Massachusetts, among other states. In one case in DeKalb County, Ill., at least 38 families...

With the ramping up of rhetoric regarding the move to a Renewable Electricity Standard, just how effectively can Wind Power and Solar Power deliver a constant and regular supply of electrical power? This post uses the most current Government statistics to show conclusively that both these forms of Renewable Power fail, and that they fail comprehensively to deliver power, not only for when it is needed the most, but for all the time.

I believe Maine’s governor and other public servants are dedicated to making our state a better place, but when they become carried away by a tide of one-sided allegations, the public is not well-served. They should have pursued wind power with caution since the governments of every European country that has tried it have discontinued their subsidies. They said they did so because wind is more expensive than natural gas and other alternatives, and because wind power can contribute to pollution during the 70 percent of the time turbines produce so little. Denmark is the prime wind power model, but...

VINALHAVEN, Maine — Residents expressed grievances about turbine noise at a Thursday meeting that allowed islanders to ask questions of two wind professionals who will be collecting noise data in an attempt to identify specific mechanical perpetrators. The experts then will come back to the community with options and prices for noise mitigation. It has been about two years since Vinalhaven voters, with a 383-5 vote, approved the construction of three wind turbines. It has been about a year since wind started producing power on Vinalhaven and North Haven. At Thursday’s meeting, held in Vinalhaven School's auditorium and hosted by...

Renewable Power is being hyped as the direction for the future, and is even in Legislation the Democrats hope to pass. Real World statistics for Renewable Power show something entirely different. These stats are for the U.S. and for the month of April, and the accompanying commentary shows that Wind Power and Solar Power just cannot deliver the power required absolutely, and that they never will.

On the afternoon of May 19, in a single chaotic hour, more than a thousand wind turbines in the Columbia River Gorge went from spinning lazily in the breeze to full throttle as a storm rolled east out of Hood River. Suddenly, almost two nuclear plants worth of extra power was sizzling down the lines -- the largest hourly spike in wind power the Northwest has ever experienced.

A group of Western Maryland residents and a state conservation group have filed formal notice they'll sue to stop construction of a wind farm in Garrett County, contending the massive turbines "almost certainly" will harm endangered bats in the forested, mountainous region.

Presumably finding an excess of free time after commencement, Harvard economics professor Jeremy Stein has turned to prophecy--or parody. It's not entirely clear. His fictional report in The Harvard Crimson is written as if it were appearing on May 27, 2025, in the middle of Scott Brown's first term of presidency and a financial crisis triggered by wind farm-related derivatives. Some of the highlights: THE FINANCIAL CRISIS UNDER SCOTT BROWN Just four months into his first term, President Scott P. Brown faces what is rapidly becoming a severe financial crisis, with the collapse yesterday of yet another Stable Wind Farm...

Study: Wind Farms = Bird Killers Tiffany Kaiser - June 7, 2010 11:51 AM A recent study in Klickitat County, Washington shows that active wind farms in Washington and Oregon kill more than 6,500 birds and 3,000 bats annually. Biologist Orah Zamora works for West, Inc., an ecological field study company, monitors the Windy Flats project, one of the largest wind farms in the United States. Zamora looks for dead birds and bats that have been severed by the spinning blades of the surrounding wind turbines in order to conduct survey's to observe how wind-power development is affecting birds. "It's...

The State of Michigan is headed for an Energy Crisis, and the Democrat Party is mostly to blame. From the Alpena News: According to a press release from Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s office, the state’s decision is based on findings of the Michigan Public Service Commission, which said the company failed to demonstrate the plant was needed to meet future supply needs. In October of 2008, the MDEQ affirmed that the area was safe of air pollution from the proposed plant. So, the Granholm administration went to work to stop the plant by changing the rules. Jennifer Granholm’s State of the...

Climate Science: Noted scientists at a Chicago climate conference declare that global warming is not only dead, but that the planet faces a big chill for decades to come. What about those frozen wind turbines? It's not exactly Copenhagen or Kyoto, but the 700 scientists attending the fourth International Conference on Climate Change, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, had some chilling news of their own in the most liberal sense. "Global warming is over — at least for a few decades," Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told the gathering. "However, the bad news is that...

More than any other state, Michiganders identify with the Great Lakes. They are essential to the state's tourism industry and provide extensive recreational opportunities to boaters, fisherman, and those who stroll the many miles of pristine beaches. It seems hard to believe that anyone would want to put the Great Lakes at risk for the unproven development of off-shore wind energy. On-shore wind energy is expensive and off-shore wind energy even more so. A study done for the Heritage Center for Data Analysis titled "A Renewable Electricity Standard: What It Will Really Cost Americans," quantifies the economic cost of wind...

We've written before (see here and here) about the costs of trying to create "green jobs." The problem, ultimately, is that it's really expensive for the government to make energy sources that simply aren't efficient on their own attractive enough to compete with coal, oil and natural gas. Today the Wall Street Journal highlights just how much Massachusetts residents are going to have to pay for the latest triumph in the green energy revolution: On Monday, Cape Wind asked state regulators to approve a 15-year purchasing contract with the utility company National Grid at 20.7 cents per kilowatt hour, starting...

COLOSSAL WIND COST: Tom King, president of National Grid, and Jim Gordon, president of Cape Wind Associates, announce a deal in Waltham, MA yesterday to start charging Bay State customers 20.7 cents per kilowatt hour in 2013.

With the federal government's approval yesterday of the Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound, Massachusetts stands at the nexus of the nation's growing offshore wind power industry, state and business officials said. And that means jobs: engineering jobs, construction jobs, technical service jobs and more. "It spans the spectrum from blue collar to white collar. It's boatmen taking boats out there; it's blue collar workers turning the wrenches," said Roger Freeman, coordinator of the energy and environment working group at the advocacy group Progressive Business Leaders Network, which has supported Cape Wind. "I think the primary beneficiary will be the...

Americans are being inundated with claims about renewable and alternative energy. Advocates for these technologies say that if we jettison fossil fuels, we'll breathe easier, stop global warming and revolutionize our economy. Yes, "green" energy has great emotional and political appeal. But before we wrap all our hopes -- and subsidies -- in it, let's take a hard look at some common misconceptions about what "green" means.1. Solar and wind power are the greenest of them all. Unfortunately, solar and wind technologies require huge amounts of land to deliver relatively small amounts of energy, disrupting natural habitats. Even an aging...

Legislation to implement standards for renewable power has been put on hold for now in the U.S. However, with a brutal Winter now behind the U.S. maybe those legislators need to look at some statistics on how the existing ‘flavour of the month’ renewable power plants performed at delivering power when it was needed most. Those statistics prove (again) that renewable power cannot supply power on the basis it is needed, and for when it is needed. This post explains those stats, what is behind them, and the ramifications. Not surprisingly, when it was needed the most, the power source...

As New Englanders await a decision in Massachusetts on a bitterly contested proposal to build the nation’s first offshore wind farm, the State of Rhode Island is forging ahead with its own project in the hope of outpacing — and upstaging — its neighbor. Crucial to its strategy is dispelling worries that economics will trump the environment, or the broader public good. Instead of having a private developer dominate the research on potential sites, as Massachusetts has, Rhode Island embarked on a three-year scientific study, to be completed in August, of all waters within 30 miles of its coast. It...