Yet when the National Planning Committee (NPC) approved plans for building a wind turbine farm directly on the path of the migration flyway, SPNI came out in strong opposition..."Of the 90,000 birds migrating over, the flight path of roughly 10,000 passed directly through the air space where the wind turbines are planned. Obviously these birds would have been in great danger of collision with the blades," says Alon. Weekly surveys were conducted during the winter, and daily migration surveys resumed on March 1st, 2005. "During the spring of 2005, bird observers counted another 200,000 plus birds, mostly White Storks of which a minimum of 15,000 crossed over the proposed turbine farm within the range of the blades.

Power-generating wind turbines will soon have to comply with tough new technical standards to ensure they can withstand typhoons, lightning strikes and other extreme weather conditions. Wind-power generation is a major pillar in the government's push to use alternative energy sources to fight global warming. In recent years, however, storms have caused extensive damage to many wind turbines. International standards drawn up in Europe are not sufficient to protect wind turbines from Japan's weather patterns, according to officials of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, an arm of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

"India has a wind power potential of 20,000 Mw for immediate exploitation and you don't have to import wind from the West Asia because it is freely available," he added. So can wind power help solve India's power crisis? "Absolutely not,"said a senior MNRE official adding that it could be supplementary but would never replace the conventional energy sources. Wind energy is called ‘infirm power' because it is subject to nature's vagaries, which affects its availability. According to a senior Central Electricity Authority (CEA) official, wind is abundantly available only during monsoons and is also temperature dependent, which does not allow for planned addition of wind energy to the grid. This means it cannot be used for meeting the peak demand.

China unveiled its first national climate change plan today.

BEIJING - China acknowledged Monday that it soon may become the world's biggest source of harmful greenhouse gases but said the United States and other advanced countries must take the lead in fighting global warming because they had been polluting heavily for longer.

From Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to E.ON, the world's largest companies are investing in wind power, the best-performing energy in the past year. Led by Vestas Wind Systems and Iberdrola of Spain, utilities and governments in the United States, China and Europe will spend as much as $150 billion on wind projects in the next five years, according to CLSA Research. Lawmakers are providing financial incentives because windmills are non-polluting and cost less than solar projects. "Wind has the biggest potential to meet renewable energy targets over the next decade, compared with solar and biofuels," said Philippe de Weck, who started the Pictet Clean Energy fund last month for Pictet in Geneva.

Either way, the politics of climate change are no longer the internal quarrels of the Western world alone. They have finally reached the global stage. Europe has now to choose between a pragmatic long-term policy that allows growing prosperity to develop and adopt cleaner industries or a continuation of short-sighted unilateralism that has failed to achieve its basic goals.

TOKYO: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. said Wednesday it has received orders for a total of 788 wind turbine power generation systems from five U.S. companies. The order included 166 wind turbines for Edison Mission Energy, 118 for Babcock & Brown Ltd., 197 for Airtricity Inc. and 180 for Eurus Energy America Corp. Another unnamed company ordered 127 units, the Japanese company said.

The demand for natural gas, hydropower and nuclear power will grow in the coming years and by 2050 solar energy, wind energy and biomass energy will account for 15 percent of the nation's total energy consumption, said Yan.

IKATA, Ehime Prefecture - Though wind turbines offer the exciting promise of a clean source of energy, they also create another form of pollution - noise. Residents here have complained that noise from newly installed wind turbines perched atop a ridge of the Sadamisaki Peninsula has been rattling their homes and plaguing them with sleepless nights.

As many as 44 wind turbines operated by Suzlon in Sangli District in Maharashtra have been shut down following protests from local residents. Local residents are demanding more money for their land, which is leased to the company.

Hudi Hastowo told reporters that while there would be no technical or economic problems with building a nuclear plant, achieving public acceptance would still be difficult. "We'll hold a public awareness campaign, since we don't have any other options to deal with future power shortages (apart from nuclear energy)," he said. "Remote villages may use solar panels or wind turbines but those technologies can't generate the massive amounts of power needed for industry."

Policymakers have settled on 'emissions trading' as their favorite global-warming fix. But it isn't working.

March 12, 2007 issue - Global warming isn't the only debate that may be over. Governments and policymakers around the world also seem to have settled on a solution. "A responsible approach to solving this crisis," Al Gore said recently at New York University's Law School, would be "to authorize the trading of emissions ... globally." Emissions trading, also called carbon trading, is being expanded in the European Union and Japan. And in many places where it's yet to take hold, like Sacramento, Sydney and Beijing, politicians are embracing it. Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank and Europe's foremost political expert on global warming, predicts that the value of carbon credits in circulation, now about $28 billion, will climb to $40 billion by 2010.

This should be great news for the environment, but many experts have their doubts. The notion that emissions trading is going to make a significant dent in global warming is deeply flawed, they say. Current emissions-trading schemes have proved to be little more than a shell game, allowing polluters in the developed world to shift the burden of making cuts onto factories in the developing world.

Since the oil shocks of the 1970s, governments around the world have paid plenty of lip service to renewable energies such as wind and solar power. But only a few governments have been able to engineer policies that have begun to bring alternative energies into wider use. Renewable fuels provided 18% of the world’s total electricity supply in 2004, according to figures from the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based intergovernmental organization. Almost all of that, though, came from hydropower, a source with limited growth potential because of geographic constraints. The use of wind and solar power is growing, but they still generated only 1% of global electricity production in 2004, the latest year for which figures are available.

China is expected to overtake Germany and the United States to become the world's largest wind power producer by 2020, a report forecast. The 2006 Annual Report on China's New Energy Industry says that the 10th Five-Year Plan (2000-2005) period saw a rapid development of wind power industry, with the installed capacity rose by 30 percent on an annual average, rising from 350,000 kw in 2000 to 1.26 million kw in 2005, ranking 7th in the world.

HIGASHIDORI, Aomori Prefecture–The industry ministry Wednesday said it is trying to determine what caused a 68-meter-high wind turbine to collapse earlier this week since strong winds apparently were not blowing at the time. The incident at the Iwaya Wind Farm in the Iwaya district of Higashidori in this northern prefecture is thought to have occurred late Monday, according to officials of Eurus Energy Holdings Corp., which manages the wind farm. While no one was injured, the incident resulted in temporary power outages to homes in the area because power lines were severed.

ASAHIKAWA, Hokkaido–Wind turbines that grace the terrain of this northern region may soon be painted fire-engine red and lit up at night: not for aesthetic reasons, but to stop low-flying birds from crashing into the whirling blades. With reports of rare bird species being killed off by wind turbines in Hokkaido and elsewhere, companies that operate them are scrambling to find effective yet economically viable methods to make the units more environmentally friendly.

Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries plans to work with US conglomerate General Electric on nuclear and wind power generation ventures, a newspaper said on Saturday. Under the plan, the two firms will jointly bid for a $300-million project to boost capacity by 20 per cent at the 1.36-million-kilowatt Laguna Verde nuclear plant in Mexico, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported.

China Datang Corp. has won the right from the Shanghai government to build China’s first offshore wind farm..... The project will be located near Donghai Bridge, in the southeast of Shanghai. It is scheduled to be completed before 2010, and will have a capacity of 100 megawatts, enough to power 200,000 households in Shanghai.

As part of international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the government is considering whether to introduce higher mandatory targets for renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power, for the country’s utilities in fiscal 2011-14. The obligatory use of new sources of energy is in line with the renewable portfolio standard (RPS) program outlined in the Special Measures Law Concerning the Use of New Energy by Electric Utilities–known as the RPS Law–which came into effect in fiscal 2003. The law obliges utilities to rely on five kinds of renewable energy–wind, low-head microhydraulic, biomass, solar and geothermal power–for more than 1.35 percent of their electricity by fiscal 2010, or 12.2 billion kilowatt-hours of what they sell nationwide. But, given the technical challenges to achieving the target quickly, power companies have been given a transitional allowance to gradually meet the target by fiscal 2010, beginning from 0.39 percent in fiscal 2003. The mandatory level for fiscal 2006 is 0.52 percent.