The town's Select Board plans to file documents with the state Public Service Board opposing a wind farm proposal to be located in Clarendon, Ira and neighboring towns. Board members voted Monday to oppose Vermont Community Wind Farm's plan to develop an 80-megawatt wind facility and to erect a 197-foot temporary wind measurement tower on Susie's Peak in Clarendon.

There were many testimonies as to how wind turbines would ruin beautiful Garrett County's rural landscape. But more importantly pointed out were all the misconceptions and mistruths that the wind companies have been advertising and lobbying. Wind turbines provide meaningless energy because there is no capacity. This means that the wind turbines can produce energy only when the wind is blowing and not provide meaningful energy when it is needed the most, with no possible way of storing the energy for later usage when it could actually help. Therefore, not a single coal-fired plant could ever be replaced or kept from being built by constructing wind turbines. It was clear to me and almost everyone present that the many cons of wind turbine installation on state lands far outweigh the very few pros. It was also crystal clear to me that Garrett County does not want wind turbines.

Approval for new wind farms could become even harder to obtain, following the launch today of a new national alliance of more than 30 anti-wind farm groups that is being headed by an influential lobbyist and senior executive at one of the UK's top PR firms. The National Alliance of Wind Farm Action Groups (NAWAG) has been launched with the goal of orchestrating a "grass-roots revolt" against "ruthless" wind farm developers, pledging to recruit as many as possible of the 200-plus anti-wind farm groups operating in the UK.

"Green jobs" are touted as the universal cure-all, saving the environment and the economy at the same time. Congress included more than $80 billion in spending and tax incentives to promote them in the recent stimulus bill. Van Jones, President Barack Obama's "green" jobs adviser, even recently called for using ex-convicts to build solar cells ...Unfortunately, claims about the wonders of green jobs are all too often constructed on myths about economics, forecasting, and technology.

Like anybody who understands electricity, McCracken is both slightly provoked and slightly alarmed by the headlong rush into wind power in Europe and America. "Wind power has its critics and they feel that their reservation have been overridden by policy makers whose imagination have been captured by a green agenda that downplays wind's limitations," says McCracken judiciously. The major limitation, of course, is wind's intermittency -- its lack of "dispatchability." Quite simply, you can never count on it.

Researched and written by Eleanor Tillinghast of Green Berkshires Inc. this is a comprehensive study of the probable impact of industrial wind plants on the rural character, quality-of-life and economy of the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. Specific issues addressed include visual aesthetics, tourism, property values, public roads and public safety.

Decisions on the appropriateness of building industrial wind installations should be based on the scientific facts of the issue, not just about who stands to profit from these projects. Since wind can never provide RELIABLE power on demand, it is simply the electricity version of the ethanol scam. It mattered not that it cost more energy to make a gallon of ethanol than it provided, nor that there were many who foretold of the problems associated with ethanol. Alas, since there was money to be made, politicians pushed it through in their "politically correct" rush to appear "green". Now, we are left dealing with the consequences of the rising costs of food and anything else associated with corn, the havoc it is wreaking on the environment, while it certainly isn't alleviating our oil dependence. It is very sad indeed, that energy and public policy decisions are being based on greed, ignorance, and misinformation being put forth by corporate wind profiteers, pandering politicians, and agenda-driven, corporate-owned media (e.g. - GE owns NBC), rather than according to what's actually right and wrong.

The Fiji Electricity Authority has admitted that its $34million Butoni Wind farm in Sigatoka was a failure. And this was because of insufficient study of the area. ...It was also revealed that one of the joint venture partners of the FEA, Pacific Hydro Limited, pulled out in 2003 after seeing the project as financially uneconomical based on its development cost and expected cost of energy generation.

A Spanish-owned corporation wants to build a new wind farm in the East County with more than 100 wind turbines. Executives rolled into Boulevard recently to pitch their plan, and reaction was not too friendly. Executives from the Iberdrola Energy Company showed up with a slick Power Point presentation, colorful graphics and a few dozen chocolate bars - dark chocolate with a logo on the wrapper. All this to pitch a new wind farm project to the Boulevard Community Planning Group.

Trustpower's $400 million Kaiwera Downs wind farm, near Gore, has been granted consent, but that is likely to be appealed. The 240MW wind farm, 15km southeast of Gore, was approved yesterday by the Gore District Council and Environment Southland after the application was heard at an eight-day hearing in March and April. But an opponent of the development, Henry McFadzien, said an appeal will probably be made to the Environment Court, although he had doubts whether an appeal could be funded right through to a court hearing. In its decision yesterday, the hearing panel said the positive effects of the wind farm, at a national level, outweighed the negative visual effects.

The complaints last year were at first sporadic to Franklin County District Attorney Derek Champagne's office in this small North Country town. Then the outcry grew. Residents were alleging undue influence was being put on local leaders to approve multi-million-dollar wind farms, with turbines 200 feet or taller, in their rural communities near the Canadian border. To Champagne's dismay, he believed some of the public officials approving the contracts were also leasing their own land to the wind developers. Champagne found as many as seven town-board members in Franklin County who allegedly had conflicts of interest. ...Champagne calls it New York's version of the "gold rush" and said it's the next Enron scandal in the making.

As you can see most green schemes collapse pretty quickly when you apply numbers to them. The problem, of course, is that the media is so politically biased, professionally incurious, and scientifically illiterate that they accept this sort of spurious pabulum without ever engaging their critical faculties.

Stocks of companies that generate electricity from solar or wind power -- or make the equipment to do so -- soared during the last three years. But the global credit crunch, higher prices for raw materials like polysilicon used in solar panels, and cuts in government subsidies to consumers, such as in Germany last month, have made investors much warier. High oil prices, analysts say, can't compensate for all that. "Some months ago, it was still true that a rising tide lifts all the boats," said Thomas Germann, an analyst at Zuercher Kantonalbank. "But investors are now scrutinizing what's going on at the company level, because cost efficiency has become more important." ..."The easy money has been made," said Jean Ryan, who oversees three funds with about €2 billion in assets at KBC Asset Management International Ltd., a unit of Belgium-based KBC Group NV.

Bats and wind turbines make a bad mix. In fact, bats have become an unexpected casualty in the burgeoning wind-power industry, with several thousand bats killed by turbines each year in North America. Now studies are being conducted at the future site of a Peace region wind farm in order to save bats from dropping dead near the whirling blades. ...Most of the wind-farm research has been focused on birds, and little is known about the effect on bats, although new studies are beginning to yield clues on how to minimize the impact of the wind farms on the tiny flying animals.

Transmitting electricity over hundreds of miles to market constrains wind energy development, speakers told 600 participants at a conference at the University of Wyoming last week. So do local, state and federal regulation; and taxation issues, they said. But Laura Ladd, energy economics advisor to Gov. Dave Freudenthal, noted a major omission to that list. "Nowhere in here did we hear of economics as a constraint," Ladd said.

Everything is bigger about wind energy these days. The towers are taller, and the rotating turbines have greater diameter. Leases to landowners are becoming more lucrative. But as "big wind" owned by utilities and merchant generators gets bigger, voices for "little wind" - people who want to build backyard generators or farmers unhappy about the effects of towers - are beginning to make themselves heard. ..."If you're a farmer and used to a quiet environment, a wind turbine changes everything," said Heide ...At a meeting last week in Malcom, Heide warned landowners about broken tiles, damaged roads and fences during turbine construction, and noise and shadows from rotating turbines.

The RSPB Scotland study looked at 12 operating upland wind farms in the UK and found that numbers of several birds of high conservation concern are reduced close to the turbines. Affected birds include the hen harrier and golden plover, which are protected under European law, and the curlew, which is a high-priority species under the UK Biodiversity Action Plan.

"This is war," is the way Amherstburg resident Mick MacCorquodale describes the looming legal fight against 120-metre-high industrial wind turbines popping up near his home and across the county. Essex County council hasn't even approved its alternative energy planning policies yet, but MacCorquodale is already gathering support to appeal them to the Ontario Municipal Board. Any appeal would further delay the more than a dozen wind farm projects being proposed at locations throughout the county. ...County council is expected to pass the third draft of its official plan amendments on alternative energy projects Wednesday after a year of study.