With Japan’s crisis raising new questions about nuclear power, this might seem an ideal time for a company that is a global leader in alternative energy and has a big presence in an energy-starved country, India. But for Enercon of Germany, one of the world’s biggest makers of wind turbines, India is shaping up as a disaster.

German renewable energy group WPD's said Wednesday it was planning erecting a 500-600-megawatt offshore wind power park off Korsnäs on Finland's Gulf of Bothnia coast. If built, the generators would quintuple Finland's wind power generating capacity.

Clare County Council has approved the seventh wind farm in the county despite some local opposition. This follows German company Pro Ventum securing planning permission for a €10 million six-turbine wind farm at Tullabrack near Kilrush. It is the second wind farm that the company has secured permission for in the west Clare area and the previous proposal also faced opposition. Currently there are two wind farms operational in the county - the Pro Ventum wind farm at Monmore and the second 11-turbine wind farm near Connolly in mid-Clare.

Deep-water wind farms will top the agenda when U.S. Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass., leads a congressional delegation to Germany this spring. The trip will involve discussions of a variety of energy issues, said Delahunt, chairman of the bipartisan study group that includes current and former members of Congress. But of particular interest to Delahunt, who represents Cape Cod and the Islands, are German renewable energy companies - including one involved in building a test deep-water wind farm off the German coast in the North Sea. Some of the companies in this project ‘’are beginning to talk about a need for American subsidiaries,'’ Delahunt said. ‘’What better place than Massachusetts for this kind of foreign investment? Wind is to the Northeast, what oil is to Saudi Arabia,'’ he said.

The German utility company EON has unveiled plans to build a wind farm off the Scottish coast, which it said would be the biggest UK installation of its kind, with an aggregate capacity of 180 megawatts. The 338 million pound investment, which is expected to become operational in the spring of 2009, will produce 550 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year.

After killing nuclear energy and coal-fired power plants, Germany is now taking aim at its own green policies, says the Wall Street Journal. After building nearly 20,000 windmills, Germans are now regulating them well beyond economical sense:

E.ON is planning to build a large offshore wind farm in the North Sea. This was announced by the company today at the 5th Maritime Conference of the German Environment Ministry in Hamburg. The wind farm will be built roughly 40 kilometers (approx. 25 miles) to the northwest of the East Frisian island of Juist. To this end, E.ON has now taken over the Offshore Wind Park Delta North Sea project from the Enova Group. The sea area selected has already been designated as particularly suitable for this purpose by the Bundesamt für Seeschifffahrt und Hydrographie (BSH – German Federal Agency of Maritime Shipping and Hydrography).

A group of four European energy companies on Friday revealed plans for a subsea electricity cable to bring more power from Germany to Norway from 2011. The 700 megawatt (MW) cable which would boost power flows between continental Europe and the hydropower reliant Nordic region would cost 500 million euros (USD 659.8 million), the consortium said in a statement issued in Germany. The cost would be shared equally by Agder Energi and Lyse of Norway, EGL of Switzerland, and northern German utility EWE, a spokeswoman for EWE said.

The German government and the country’s energy companies have launched a massive joint offshore wind park project aimed at overcoming the source’s technical insecurities. Last month, German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel gave the green light to build the first German offshore wind energy test park in the North Sea.

The German environment minister Sigmar Gabriel gave the green light to a project that will see the construction of 12 offshore windmills in the North Sea. The move will go someway to reversing the country’s lag in the development of offshore wind farms, he said. Each windmill will generate 5 megawatts of electricity and will be ready for commercial use at the beginning of 2008, Gabriel said. The farm will be located 45 km off the island of Borkum.