U.S. companies are getting squeezed out of the big Chinese wind-power market even as Dallas investors are bringing Chinese firms here via a big wind farm in Texas, according to a new industry report.

A federal panel charged with assessing Cape Wind's impact on dozens of historic sites includes an architect, an anthropologist and a Texan who runs one of the nation's largest beer distributors. Last week, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation identified a five-member Cape Wind review panel, as a final federal ruling on the controversial offshore wind farm appears on the horizon.

A group of Wampanoag tribes who say they've been cast aside on issues from the Nantucket Sound wind farm to the future of gaming are breaking away to create a new council to deal with state government. The state-recognized tribes are calling on Gov. Deval Patrick to disband the Massachusetts Commission on Indian Affairs, the current liaison to state tribes.

U.S. banks had looked forward to a huge "cap-and-trade market" a system where companies would buy and sell the right to emit gases blamed for warming the planet. Many hired carbon traders, picked up assets, and trained members of energy desks to deal in emissions markets. But prospects for a broad U.S. carbon market have dimmed. U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican working on a compromise climate bill, declared economy-wide cap-and-trade "dead" this month.

The Energy Department worked closely with the wind industry lobby to discredit a Spanish report that criticized wind power as a job killer, internal DOE e-mails reveal. ...The e-mails show the wind lobbyists shared their concerns with DOE employees, who agreed the study needed to be refuted. In August, DOE produced a white paper specifically attacking the study.

But environmental activists have tried to block the project, arguing that several endangered bird species in nearby forest could lose some of their habitat. The land abuts Guanica State Forest, where endangered nightjars and other creatures breed and nest. Francisco Saez, spokesman of the Pro Bosque Seco Ventanas Verraco Coalition, said the wind energy project belongs elsewhere.

Not many years ago, there wasn't enough wind power coming from the Great Plains to worry about. Now there is, and lots of people are worrying. A group of mostly East Coast utility companies calling itself the Coalition for Fair Transmission Policy fears that the prime conditions in the Great Plains will make the region's wind power too cheap for its members to compete with, unless developers there are made to pay the costs of moving wind power eastward.

A federal historic preservation agency will hold a meeting March 22 at Cape Cod Community College to gather public comments on the proposed Nantucket Sound wind farm.

Senate Democrats lashed out at the Obama administration on Wednesday, saying its stimulus wind energy program creates jobs overseas instead of in the U.S., and they're calling for the administration to put a stop to it. "Today, we are demanding the Obama administration suspend this program immediately," said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

Last spring, a university study from Spain roiled Capitol Hill. The study, funded by a free-market think tank with links to the fossil fuel industry, calculated that government subsidies for the wind-power industry killed more jobs than they created, because the subsidies drained money from the (more efficient) private sector. ...On May 12, 2009, more than a month after the study was released, a group of climate activists scheduled a conference call to discuss how to refute the Spanish researcher's claims. The group included officials from the American Wind Energy Association ...[and] researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a division of the Energy Department.

The federal government's decision on the proposed Nantucket Sound wind farm is now firmly in the hands of U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. Surprising no one, negotiations between Cape Wind, Wampanoag Indian tribes on Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard and the government ground to a close today with neither side budging.

Cape Wind developer Jim Gordon has offered two Native American tribes millions to halt their opposition as the clock runs down on the review period for the controversial wind power project slated for Nantucket Sound. Sources told the Herald that Gordon, through a middleman, offered to pay the two tribes a total of $50,000 a year for 20 years if they would support the project.

In a letter sent Feb. 9 to U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Jeffrey Madison, a former member of the Aquinnah tribe's tribal council and an attorney at a law firm hired a month ago by the project's developer, said the idea that the wind farm would harm the tribe's cultural tradition was a "fabrication" invented by opponents of the project "who wish to derail the project."

The state's four largest utilities today are expected to receive bids from solar, biomass, wind and other renewable energy firms for long-term electricity contracts ...But some energy firms and business groups are publicly and privately expressing concern that the Patrick administration has spent too much time pushing wind energy.

Federal agencies cut corners and violated environmental laws in approving San Diego Gas & Electric Co.'s Sunrise Powerlink, opponents of the big power line claimed yesterday in a lawsuit. They are asking a federal judge in Sacramento to keep construction of the proposed transmission line from the Imperial Valley to San Diego from starting until a new review of the project is completed.

Catherine the Great once said: "A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache." Islanders have experienced their share of both over the past decade, as visions of energy independence have been tempered by talk of viewsheds, environmental impacts and the preservation of cultural heritage.