So you plant your feet in the gritty soil beneath the whirring monsters that seem to brush the blue sky and you feel the hot wind dancing from the south and for a long time you just stare. This is wind energy. And one day, many scientists believe, it will drive the world. Of course, not everyone has that sense of awe over the whole thing. Take rancher Bob Emick. Inside his home, which sits smack in the middle of 98 of the science fiction-looking turbines...He leans on one elbow, glances out a window and watches a rotor spin. "I guess," he said, "you just get used to them."

A former Public Utility Commission chairman discussed the growth of wind power in Texas during an annual meeting of Save Our Scenic Hill Country Environment held yesterday in Fredericksburg. ...The local group, which held their annual meeting yesterday at the Central Texas Electrical Co-op building, opposes construction of wind turbines and private transmission lines in the Hill Country.

The wind industry, fighting to hold onto a generous tax credit set to expire in December, has been arguing that it does not need the support forever - just a little while longer, until it can compete with fossil fuels on its own.

Performance Services, an Indianapolis-based engineering and construction company, has been seeking financial backers and a power purchase agreement since February for a turbine park planned for Purdue and private land in western Tippecanoe County. But a rocky economy has slowed the progress.

A minor firestorm has flared after the attorney representing Upstate NY Power Corp., developer of the proposed Galloo Island Wind Farm, claimed Thursday the developer never offered an 18-year PILOT to ease legislators' concerns about a proposed 20-year agreement.

City council members in Champaign will talk Tuesday about wind power - not the hot-air-politics type, but the wind turbine type. ...the city planning staff will discuss wind energy conservation systems, particularly small wind turbines within city limits and how to regulate wind farms near city boundaries. City Planner Bruce Knight said state law requires cities to regulate wind turbines within 1½ miles of their city limits. The Champaign County Board has adopted a wind farm ordinance, he said.

CHILTON - A public information meeting on life near wind turbines will be held at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 1 at the Engler Auditorium at Chilton High School in Chilton. The event, which is hosted by Calumet County Citizens for Responsible Energy, is free and open to the public. Dr. Nina Pierpont, a pediatrician, will speak on the "wind turbine syndrome" and the health effects of wind turbines on humans. Dr. Richard Bolton, a physicist and president of the Environmental Compliance Alliance, will talk about the environmental impact of wind turbine noise on humans and wildlife.

Many area residents voiced their concerns - some by talking softly, some by yelling - over a proposed tax reduction for the Cohocton wind power projects Friday morning. The hearing, hosted by the Steuben County Industrial Development Agency, was a way for SCIDA board members to receive some specific community input on a Payment in Lieu of Taxes agreement the board is negotiating with Canandaigua Power Partners and Canandaigua Power Partners II, according to SCIDA Executive Director James Sherron. "This meeting is for you, the public to be allowed the opportunity to give comment relative to what the IDA has been asked to do," Sherron said, adding SCIDA's jurisdiction extended only to financial assistance. ...Cohocton Wind Watch ringleader James Hall, in his 11-minute speach, told Sherron he did not approve of giving a PILOT with lower payment rates than what UPC had previously said was budgeted for the project. "In writing, in the formal application, (UPC) admitted, and said publicly, they're willing to pay $4.5 million in taxes," Hall said. "Not bad. Sounds like we might even drop a lot of our opposition. I'd like my taxes to go down."

Some 51 per cent of African-Eurasian migratory raptor species have an "unfavourable" conservation status. John O'Sullivan, of Birdlife International, a global alliance of conservation organisations, said: "We have recently heard about the sad case of the golden eagle being poisoned in Scotland, but birds of prey face additional problems trying to settle in networks of suitable habitats along their migration paths. We know little about the status of raptors in Africa, and in Asia species are poorly understood." The main threats to the birds, Mr O'Sullivan said, were habitat loss, illegal hunting, power lines, and wind farm initiatives.

ST. CROIX - The territory's Water and Power Authority announced Monday that contract talks with wind-power producer Innoventor Technologies had failed, ending a process that WAPA and Innoventor had promised would bring affordable, renewable energy to the Virgin Islands.

A four-hour work session Saturday was not enough for the town's wind committee to reach a consensus on noise level limits and setbacks for industrial wind turbines in the town. After a long debate over a one-page proposal by wind committee member Beth A. White, the nine members of the Town Council, Planning Board and wind committee present agreed to disagree.

FREEDOM -- Tensions concerning a proposed wind turbine project continued to rise during an informational meeting that quickly turned into more of a debate on Monday evening.

Twenty-six local farmers are opposed to the erection of power lines over their land to connect a wind farm to the national grid. They want the cables laid underground instead and have offered to dig the trenches themselves.

"It's really an opportunity for the public to come and tell us what it is they want us to look at in the EIS," said Allen Kam, with the State Energy Office. Those worried undersea cables could affect important fishing areas or wind turbines would upset the view have 30 days to let the state know about those specific concerns. That information will be factored into a draft EIS.

The benefits that wind-farm operations could bring to Franklin County will be shared next week during talks on whether property taxes will be waived in favor of negotiated payments. The Franklin County Industrial Development Agency is bringing together the parties impacted by the wind-farm projects in the eastern portion of the county, called Noble Chateaugay Wind Park LLC and Noble Bellmont Wind Park LLC. The meeting, set for Wednesday at the IDA Office on Elm Street, will include the developer, Noble Environmental Power of Connecticut, and representatives from the Town of Bellmont, the Town of Chateaugay, Chateaugay Central School and IDA Executive Director Brad Jackson. Noble plans to build 72 towers in Chateaugay and 14 more in Bellmont on 8,623 acres south of Route 11 and east of Route 374.

New York Power Authority President and Chief Executive Officer Richard Kessel met recently with the Press-Republican Editorial Board to outline his agency's plan to "do the biggest energy project in the state since the St. Lawrence/Robert Moses power project 50 year ago." The authority would import up to 2,000 megawatts of power from multiple sources, including hydropower from Canada and renewable resources both here and in Canada.

Brian Cochran, Bluefield city solicitor, in the process of drafting a tall structure ordinance so the city has something in place if a developer specifically wants to acquire property and erect a wind turbine project like the proposed Dominion and BP project in Tazewell County, but Cochran said there's no hurry to get one in place. "The city of Bluefield already has some restrictive zoning in place," Cochran said. "I don't see where our code would allow a development like the one that has been proposed in Tazewell County."

"The wind industry's central tenet now is that bigger is better," said John O. Dabiri, an aeronautics professor who runs Caltech's Center for Bioinspired Engineering. "It certainly goes against conventional wisdom, but we're taking the opposite perspective."

Sugar Creek Wind One has the potential to make history as the tallest wind farm in the U.S. Developers of the planned wind-to-energy project, to be constructed in the New Holland and Middletown areas, have asked Logan County zoning officer Will D'Andrea for a variance that would allow wind towers to be built taller than 500 feet.

Mechanical failure or electrical malfunction can also trigger a fire as capacitors, transformers, generators, electrical controls, transmission equipment, and SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems all have the potential to catch fire. This risk is amplified when there are loose or broken electrical connections, or there is an overloading of electrical circuits.