Ratepayers would save money if TVA paid the penalty - estimated at $410 million a year by 2020 - rather than meet a goal of finding 15 percent new energy sources, said U.S. Sen Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn. ...The agency's alternative green energy program - of which a wind farm on Buffalo Mountain in East Tennessee is a large part - provides less than one half of 1 percent, and customers have to pay extra to support it.

"It's a puny amount of unreliable power at a very high cost," Alexander said in an interview Thursday with The Tennessean. And then there's the appearance. "We have 10 million people a year come to the Great Smoky Mountains," he said. "They don't come down to see white towers as big as football fields with flashing lights. They come to see the Smokies."

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. - An industry-sponsored poll suggests most Tennesseans support renewable wind energy, but don't count U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander among them. "I am all for renewable fuels. I am all for clean air and carbon-free electricity," the Tennessee Republican said Tuesday in a conference call from Washington, where the Senate is getting ready to debate an energy bill that could come with renewable energy mandates. But Alexander has no love for windmills. Wind power, he said, "is expensive and disfigures the landscape. It produces a puny amount of power, and it doesn't fit Tennessee."

States with renewable portfolio standards have generated growth in the renewable energy sector, but many of the Appalachian states don't have one. Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and New York all have some fairly progressive goals, but West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee don't have a state RPS and wind projects often ignite battles.

U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) told a forum on renewable electricity choices last week that solar panels, underwater river turbines, and wood chips "are promising for TVA, but Tennessee mountaintops are absolutely the wrong place for wind turbines three times as tall as Neyland Stadium skyboxes, not to mention the transmission lines that come with them."

I was disappointed by your editorial of Sept. 9 titled "Wind power deserves the investment." I expected to find the kind of real cost information on wind power I've been looking for. In the end, I was irritated by its total failure to support the contention implicit in its title.

Gov. Phil Bredesen phoned home from the National Governors Association (NGA) winter conference this week and reported that - no surprise here - the governors couldn't agree on energy policy. The governors of green states wanted to focus on alternative and renewable energy sources while governors from coal states couldn't warm to the idea of restricting the industry that provides power and jobs to their constituents. ...Bredesen acknowledged that, though development of solar and wind resources is important, neither is yet viable. ...While hearing speakers like Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, and Thomas Friedman, author and columnist for The New York Times, Bredesen said the governors came to a common conclusion - coal is going to be the dominant method for producing electrical power for the foreseeable future.