Garland is the latest North Texas city considering a zoning ordinance aimed at regulating wind energy devices that generate power for residential use. The measure is on Tuesday's council agenda. Other cities, including Grand Prairie, Waxahachie and Oak Point, already have such ordinances. Residential wind energy devices are rare in urban areas and may be too expensive or impractical for many homeowners. But city officials say they want to make sure rules are in place for the day when wind energy devices become more commonplace.

Tygard is sponsoring a bill that would put restrictions on wind towers that produce energy. He said he wants the public to remember when cell phone towers started popping up and how it caused residential complaints. The councilman said the city needs to make sure that doesn't happen with the wind machines. "What are the height, aesthetic, noise regulations?

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. - An industry-sponsored poll suggests most Tennesseans support renewable wind energy, but don't count U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander among them. "I am all for renewable fuels. I am all for clean air and carbon-free electricity," the Tennessee Republican said Tuesday in a conference call from Washington, where the Senate is getting ready to debate an energy bill that could come with renewable energy mandates. But Alexander has no love for windmills. Wind power, he said, "is expensive and disfigures the landscape. It produces a puny amount of power, and it doesn't fit Tennessee."

OLIVER SPRINGS, TENN. - When Martha Walls gives tours of her town’s small museum, she points to framed photographs of coal-blackened faces next to those of 400-foot wind turbines that stand on a reclaimed strip mine just outside town. The Southeast’s first commercial wind farm was built here on Windrock Mountain on the site of an old coal mine after people in North Carolina fought a proposal to place it within view of Watauga County. In Oliver Springs, the new environmentally-friendly energy came without a fuss. “I don’t hear anybody complain about our windmills, and I don’t know why anybody would,” Walls said. But in North Carolina, where a proposal to build a wind farm in Ashe County has run up against opposition from longtime residents and newcomers, the road to renewable energy is not so certain.