Oregon lawmakers tried to save millions of taxpayer dollars by trimming state subsidies enjoyed by wind energy farms, but Gov. Ted Kulongoski said today he plans to veto that effort. In doing so, the governor signaled he has little tolerance for any retreat on his vision for the state as a national center for alternative energy -- recession or no. ...Sen. Ginny Burdick, D-Portland, who led the effort to rein in wind farm tax credits, said ...the tax breaks go too far and cost too much.

Politicians are straining to convince people the government is stimulating the economy. In Oregon, where lawmakers are spending $176 million to supplement the federal stimulus, Democrats are taking credit for a remarkable feat: creating 3,236 new jobs in the program's first three months. But those jobs lasted on average only 35 hours, or about one workweek.

Utility customers gulped power at record levels Monday and Tuesday as the Portland area entered the longest stretch of 100-degree days in nearly three decades. Portland General Electric Co. reported scattered blackouts in the metro area as transformers overheated and sagging power lines came into contact with foliage ..."There seems to be a lot of evidence that when you get extreme cold or heat events, you don't see very much wind generation, at least at the east end of the gorge," said Wallace Gibson, a generation and transmission analyst with the power planning council. "Right now, we're pretty much not relying on wind to meet peak loads."

A proposal to disallow wind turbines in the Blue Mountain foothills continues Thursday night before the Umatilla County Planning Commission in the Pendleton Convention Center. Milton-Freewater-area resident Richard Jolly first made his proposal to the nine-member commission at a June 25 meeting, asking for a Goal 5 amendment to set aside a section of land east of Highway 11 as a viewshed to be protected for its aesthetic, natural resource and wildlife values.

Wind-powered generators dominate the landscape along the eastern Oregon reaches of the Columbia River. Managing their intermittent power output has become a major issue for the Bonneville Power Administration. ...By October, the agency intends to establish a system to knock wind farms off its transmission grid when they are operating so far outside their scheduled output that it threatens to exhaust the agency's hydro reserves.

Along the northern border of Umatilla County, at about the center of the county, the state drew a 400,000 acre box and called it an energy generation area. It includes Milton-Freewater, some of Pendleton, Adams, Athena and Weston. This week the Umatilla County Commissioners decided they want to ask the Oregon Energy Facility Siting Council to get rid of it. ..."It creates a disadvantage in the marketplace when the state leads instead of the county," Mabbott said.

Even though wind energy companies are flocking to Oregon and the state is working to attract the business, not everyone is jumping for joy for the arrival of this new institution. Many see the wind turbines as towering giants invading the state - industrial engines spreading out over Oregon's unique landscape ...The Umatilla County Planning Commission may have to take this issue, or at least one aspect of it, head on.

Putting up towers and turbines, building roads between them and hooking them to the power grid can be expensive. Offering a little leeway on the front end in the form of tax relief - up to about $10 million until recently - has helped Oregon bring in the farms during the past decade.

Gov. Ted Kulongoski may veto bills he worries could slow Oregon's efforts to boost the green economy and reduce global warming. One of the measures would trim a program that subsidizes green energy projects by reducing tax credits for large wind farms. The other would allow older biomass plants to be counted toward the state's renewable energy standards adopted two years ago.

A state program that subsidizes green energy projects got trimmed Friday when lawmakers gave final approval to a bill that reduces tax credits for Oregon wind farms. Gov. Ted Kulongoski hasn't decided on the bill. His aide said he doesn't want to roll back Oregon's incentives for alternative energy because they have delivered "tremendous economic returns." At the same time, he recognizes that the state needs all the money it can get in the next two years.

In the waning, let's-make-a-deal days of the 2009 Oregon Legislature, clean-energy advocates, utilities and industry trade groups have been wrangling over three bills that could significantly modify renewable energy legislation implemented just two years ago.

The success of a bill that would slow wind farm development in Oregon seems assured in Salem this week, slowed only by disagreements as to the extent of cuts to the green energy tax subsidy. ...Hunt said the changes would save the state nearly $70 million over the next six years.

Given a chance to put a bill on Gov. Ted Kulongoski's desk that would cut Oregon's generous wind tax credits, the state House of Representatives paused today. Now a bill that would cut Oregon's Business Energy Tax Credits goes to a conference committee.

The Umatilla Planning Commission is considering a proposal to keep wind turbines out of the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon. The "No Turbine Zone" would amend the county's plan. Proponents say it was a result of secrecy about plans for the developments.

A proposal to keep wind turbines out of the Blue Mountains and foothills will go before the Umatilla County Planning Commission Thursday. Richard Jolly of Milton-Freewater submitted a Goal 5 amendment to the county's comprehensive plan, which aims to set aside an area as a wind turbine-free zone. ...It seeks to designate the area as a viewshed, or a visual resource, which needs to be protected by the county.

A member of Blue Mountain Alliance, a citizen group looking for more regulations on wind power development in the region, came to the Athena City Council asking for support. Ed Chesnut, who is also at Milton-Freewater City Council but was acting as a member of BMA Thursday, gave an 20 minute presentation to the council at its meeting Thursday night.

For decades, most of the nation's renewable power has come from dams, which supplied cheap electricity without requiring fossil fuels. But the federal agencies running the dams often compiled woeful track records on other environmental issues. ...Yet the shift of emphasis at the dam agencies is proving far from simple. It could end up pitting one environmental goal against another.

The Bureau of Land Management is using some stimulus money to study the effect of wind farms on a dwindling sage grouse population in Central Oregon. BLM spokesman Michael Campbell said the agency hopes to lessen or eliminate any impact. The agency would hire people to tag sage grouse in areas where wind farms are proposed and track the birds' movements to figure out where turbines could be located. Contracts have not yet been awarded.

Rows of tall turbines have already remade the landscape on wheat farms and ridgelines on private land around the region. But so far there have been no wind farms built on public land in the Northwest. That's about to change. In 2006 the BLM received six right-of-way applications for wind testing in Oregon and Washington. The number last year was four times that -- 24. Wind farms in relatively untrammeled public lands present a number of potential problems while pitting two environmental concerns ...against each other.

We continue our energy series, the Switch, with a look at the one renewable source of energy that started booming a decade ago: wind power. Companies like GE and Seimens make turbines; the federal government offers utilities big financial incentives to build wind farms; and as Kristian Foden-Vencil reports, hundreds of windmills have gone up in Oregon alone.