A wind turbine installed by the Tsukuba Municipal Government after receiving a grant from the Ministry of the Environment.

TSUKUBA, Ibaraki -- The Tsukuba municipal government has decided to pull the plug on a wind generation project after spending hundreds of millions of yen on wind turbines designed by Waseda University that turned out to be a flop.

In announcing that the city had decided to put an end to the project, Tsukuba Mayor Kenichi Ichihara cited problems with the turbines.

"The fact that they don't spin even if there is wind means there is a problem with them," Ichihara told a news conference on Friday. "We've got no option but to halt the project."

In April this year the Tsukuba Municipal Government filed a lawsuit in the Tokyo District Court demanding some 300 million yen in damages from Waseda University.

The wind turbine project proposed installing 75 turbines at 52 elementary and junior high schools in the city over a three-year period. Last year 23 generators were installed at 19 schools at a total cost of about 298 million yen.

But in November last year, it emerged that the turbines were not generating the expected level of power. The project was frozen in February this year. Ichihara said the city would have to wait for the outcome of the lawsuit against Waseda before deciding what to do with the turbines that had already been installed.

The Ministry of the Environment conducted its own investigation on the problem and informed the city in July that wind conditions in the city were light, and that not enough research had been carried out before the turbines were installed. The ministry asked the city to take steps to improve the situation, saying there were suggestions that the municipal government should return a grant of about 185 million yen, but the city expressed the opinion that there were "no concrete improvement measures."