Ratepayers would save money if TVA paid the penalty - estimated at $410 million a year by 2020 - rather than meet a goal of finding 15 percent new energy sources, said U.S. Sen Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn. ...The agency's alternative green energy program - of which a wind farm on Buffalo Mountain in East Tennessee is a large part - provides less than one half of 1 percent, and customers have to pay extra to support it.

"It's a puny amount of unreliable power at a very high cost," Alexander said in an interview Thursday with The Tennessean. And then there's the appearance. "We have 10 million people a year come to the Great Smoky Mountains," he said. "They don't come down to see white towers as big as football fields with flashing lights. They come to see the Smokies."

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."

States with renewable portfolio standards have generated growth in the renewable energy sector, but many of the Appalachian states don't have one. Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and New York all have some fairly progressive goals, but West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee don't have a state RPS and wind projects often ignite battles.