Firms and households are facing significantly higher electricity bills over the next five to 10 years as consumers shoulder the cost of renewable energy targets. Analysts estimate that households are already paying up to £10 extra a year through their utility bills to subsidise alternative forms of energy. At an energy conference in Edinburgh last week policymakers admitted that the financial burden on households and businesses will only increase as governments push to achieve ambitious renewables targets.

The Naples School Board voted last week to accept an agreement with First Wind that would give the district higher payments on any windmills the company may build within the district boundaries. ...At this point, Macaluso said First Wind has put the project on hold because of finance troubles.

No, the big stimulus plan won't "save or create 3.5 million jobs," as the president and congressional Democrats claim - at least not this year. The economy will remain feeble through 2009, analysts warn, and businesses will keep shedding jobs ...The stimulus agreement, heading for final votes in the next day or so, goes to the heart of President Barack Obama's strategy to revive the economy and will go far in shaping how Americans view his economic leadership. What it won't do is quickly snap the country out of the painful recession, now in its second year.

Danish company Vestas is catching some head wind. The world's largest wind-turbine maker on Wednesday said it might reduce jobs and scale back capital spending in Colorado and the United States, unless orders pick up, according to Bloomberg News. Vestas CEO Ditlev Engel said orders from the U.S. "came to a standstill" after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in September tightened credit for wind energy developers.

In her State of the State speech, Gov. Jennifer Granholm outlined a restructuring of Michigan's energy infrastructure that aims to meet this industrial state's future energy needs with wind power. The plan is radical but hardly new. The governor's policy closely parallels the failed experiment of Denmark -- a similar peninsular water state that has invested billions of dollars in wind generation during the last 25 years. ...it is crucial that the state understand the lessons of Denmark and the very real limitations of wind power.

Hearings set for next month on a $275 million wind project for the North Country could be halted under a request filed by the counsel for the public. Peter C.L. Roth, a senior assistant attorney general for the state, filed the request to suspend the hearings, set to begin March 9, saying there was inadequate financial information to determine whether the Granite Reliable Power's proposed wind electric generation park will be viable.

Clipper Windpower said it is reducing production levels by 15-20% as customer demand declines. "The current economic and credit conditions in global markets, coupled with lower energy prices, are resulting in reduced capital expenditures by the company's customers and delays in the timing of turbine deliveries"

A study released on the eve of a national conference on green jobs says that emerging eco-friendly work must provide adequate pay and benefits -- or risk damaging efforts to restore the economy and strive for environmental sustainability. The study released yesterday, "High Road or Low Road? Job Quality in the New Green Economy." ..."One of the greatest risks is that, in our haste to create a large quantity of new green jobs, we pay too little attention to their quality," researchers said.

Suzlon Energy Ltd. of India swung to net loss in its fiscal third quarter, hurt by rising costs and a provision to conduct repair work at the wind-turbine maker's overseas plants. Chairman and Managing Director Tulsi Tanti said the global credit crunch is likely to hit sales growth in the wind-energy sector, which had a compounded annual growth rate of more than 34% over the past five years.

Fortune's eco-blog, Green Wombat ran a story under the headline, "Wind jobs outstrip the coal industry." ...But it's a bogus comparison. According to the wind energy report, those 85,000 jobs in wind power are as "varied as turbine component manufacturing, construction and installation of wind turbines, wind turbine operations and maintenance, legal and marketing services, and more." The 81,000 coal jobs counted by the Department of Energy are only miners.

Concerns emerged this week over the effectiveness of carbon trading in encouraging alternative energy development after a tumbling carbon price made investment in projects more expensive. The price of carbon has fallen by nearly 70 per cent since reaching a high of €32.90 in April 2006 to a new low of €10.81 last week, although it recovered this week to just under €12.

Damaged rotor blades and forex losses caused the world's fifth-largest wind turbine maker Suzlon Energy post a consolidated net loss of Rs 34.90 crore for the quarter ended December 2008 against a Rs 142.8 crore profit in the corresponding previous quarter. ...Cracks were detected in 170 of the 1,250 blades for 400 turbines of the S88 V2 model supplied by Suzlon in 2007 to two of its major clients in the US -- Edison International and John Deere.

The closure this month of Trinity's Tank Car Inc.'s freight railcar manufacturing plant in Oklahoma City affected about 250 hourly and administrative employees. Tulsa-based Trinity Structural Towers Inc., which produced towers for wind farms, closed Jan. 16. About 130 hourly and administrative workers lost their jobs. Employees at both facilities were given a 60-day notice, the company said.

According to the Financial Times, E.ON UK, the British arm of the German energy group, said the viability of its London Array project, a planned 1000 MW wind farm in the Thames estuary, had been called into question by the falling prices of oil, gas and carbon dioxide emissions permits. ...Centrica, the owner of British Gas, estimates that each megawatt of wind power capacity costs about £3m to build: more than the equivalent cost for a nuclear power station.

It has been reported today that the £1.5bn London Array project, which would plant 270 turbines in the Thames Estuary off Thanet, may be jeopardised by funding doubts. ...Consortium members are likely to ask the Government to raise its level of subsidy, arguing that the private sector should not bear so much risk from a scheme that is in the national interest. London Array has been in the planning stage for years, and a team of engineers have been working on it for some time.

If they could demonstrate there was a desire for renewables here, perhaps Arizona Public Service would sign a contract with an entrepreneur to start a solar, wind or biomass energy project in northern Arizona and create new jobs here, they reasoned. That didn't happen -- APS spent that money on renewable power elsewhere. But backers aren't dismayed and say they will continue the project this coming year.

Wind turbine blade maker LM Glasfiber Group has announced that it will lay off up to 600 workers at plants in Europe and the United States. The Danish company plans to cut a fifth of its domestic workforce - 450 employees - and to close one of its two blade plants in Little Rock, Arkansas, with the loss of 150 jobs. ...Despite this, the company stressed it is confident in the long-term outlook for the wind turbine business.

New York State Electric & Gas Corp., acquired last fall by a large Spanish utility, wants to increase rates and plans to reduce capital spending this year as it faces serious financial issues. ...It is unclear how any rate increase sought by NYSEG would be impacted by the $275 million that the PSC has ordered Iberdrola to return to upstate customers as a condition of the merger.

The former head of tourism in Argyll and the Islands is to appear as a professional witness at two public inquiries into the refusal of separate wind farm proposals for hills opposite Rothesay Bay. James Fraser, formerly VisitScotland's area director for Argyll, the Isles, Loch Lomond, Stirling and the Trossachs, will give evidence against the plans when developer West Coast Energy appeals against refusal of its proposal at an inquiry which begins at the Queen's Hall in Dunoon on January 20.

Lower prices for crude oil and natural gas may not have a lasting impact on expansion of the alternative energy sector in Western Canada-- but the current worldwide economic slowdown will, observers predict. ..."When push comes to shove in the budget process and you're concerned with funding people versus funding things, the short-run discount of protecting lives virtually always wins and investing in the future by building more renewables or encouraging more R&D in renewables tends to get less attention." That translates into fewer direct or indirect subsidies and fewer regulations designed to encourage the use of alternative energy.