Attorneys on different sides of a windmill dispute in Fayette County can agree on at least one aspect of the 262-foot-tall turbines: the hulking structures can't be camouflaged. "A wind turbine can be seen. You can't hide it," said Dan Rullo, attorney for Iberdrola Resources, formerly PPM Energy. ...The project has been on hold since March 11, when the zoning hearing board denied the company's request for a special exception and variances for 24 of the turbines. The matter went before a judge Thursday after Iberdrola filed a civil suit appealing the board's denial.

The world's two most powerful wind turbines, with blades up to 500ft in diameter, are to be built on the Northumberland coast in clear view of northeast England's most renowned shorelines. ...The two machines are planned to be up to 650ft high, including their blades. At that height they would be more than 200ft taller than the current tallest turbines in Britain. ...Each could generate up to 7.5 mega-watts of power.

The grand U.S. ambitions of Indian wind-turbine manufacturer Suzlon Energy Ltd. are facing mounting problems. The Indian company -- the world's fifth-largest wind-turbine maker by sales -- earlier this year acknowledged that 65 giant blades on turbines it had sold in the U.S. Midwest were cracking because of the extreme gusts in the region. The company is reinforcing 1,251 blades, almost the total it has sold in the U.S. Now, other problems are emerging, in part because the company quickly ramped up U.S. sales to meet burgeoning demand for alternative energy. ...

The Prattsburgh town board has ruled in favor of eminent domain. The decision means First Wind, the company that wants to build a 36 turbine wind farm in Prattsburgh can now take portions of land from property owners who oppose the project. Eminent domain was proposed after seven property owners said they would not sell their land to the company. First Wind wants the property along the town highways to lay underground cables.

Wind power is unreliable. No one can turn up the wind every time electricity demand peaks. So some utilities are looking at ways to bottle up the wind's energy and store it underground for later use. "The wind blows a lot at 2 in the morning, so it makes sense to save it and use it at 5 in the afternoon when everyone comes home from work," said Georgianne Peek of Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. Compressed air energy storage (CAES) uses off-peak electricity from wind farms or other sources to pump air underground. The high pressure air acts like a huge battery that can be released on demand to turn a gas turbine and make electricity. However, a good portion of the input energy is lost in this process, making CAES one of the least efficient storage technologies available.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has created a collaboration with the six leading wind turbine makers to promote advanced research and development. ...The agreement builds on the recently released DOE report '20 Percent Wind Energy in 2030' that examines the technical feasibility of harnessing wind power to provide up to 20% of the nation's total electricity needs by 2030.

They're too noisy, too big and too clunky. And they kill bats and birds. Those are key criticisms about harnessing the wind and converting Mother Nature's fury into energy via a wind turbine, which might be better known as a windmill. Karl Douglass, an engineer with a degree from Drexel University, went about trying to remedy those complaints and he believes he's done that. Sometime this summer, his Omniwind Energy Systems of Dublin in Central Bucks will begin production on a wind turbine that he says is quiet, relatively compact and environmentally friendly. ..."You wouldn't even have seen windmills in Pennsylvania not long ago, but still it's a small amount in the overall scheme," Wood added. "Solar, wind, biomass are nice, but they're a niche, they only fulfill a small percentage of our needs."

Six wind tower sections left DMI Industries, located at the Tulsa Port of Catoosa, on Tuesday en route to a wind farm site in northern Texas. ...Less than a year ago, DMI Industries, an Otter Tail company, bought a plant built for Griffin Wheel -- a railcar manufacturer that never moved in -- to extend its geographic reach and meet the growing demand for wind towers in the southwestern states.

Research which could transform worldwide production of large-scale wind turbines is being carried out at the University of Nottingham. Peter Schubel is leading a £1.4m project called Airpower which could make it eight per cent cheaper and 11% faster to manufacture the blades. ...Dr Schubel said large-scale blades were extremely labour intensive to produce under current methods - with up to 35 people at any one time working on a single blade. This also means there can be high levels of waste because of human error.

Windflow chairman Barrie Leay strongly criticised Meridian Energy and other state-owned electricity generators on Tuesday for ignoring his company's turbines and spending more than $1 billion importing European turbines. However, Meridian Energy spokesman Alan Seay said the company's engineers had looked closely at Windflow's turbines, but they unanimously agreed they were not suitable. ...Windflow's 0.5 megawatt machines were not big enough, and Meridian's engineers had concerns about the noise generated by the two-bladed design, Seay said.

While scientists are developing many creative schemes to store wind energy, most are either far-fetched or still years from completion. Some researchers hope to create hillside pumps, or compress air in enormous underground caverns, while others envision enormous flywheels spinning with the buzz of wind-generated energy until it is ready to be spat back out and used. Two not-so-far-fetched technologies have emerged as more real and immediate possibilities -- storing wind energy in batteries, and using it to produce and store hydrogen. ...Denmark, an age-old poster child for tapping into wind energy, is already well over the golden 20 percent threshold. And they do offer one solid piece of wind-savvy advice, as relayed by Rune Birk Nielsen of the Danish Wind Industry Association in an e-mail. "We have simply put up a lot of windmills," Nielsen said.

In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in February, Edison Mission Energy, a unit of Edison International, said the 144-foot-long windmill blades it recently bought from Suzlon have begun to split at three wind-power sites it operates in the Midwest. Suzlon has recalled 1,251 blades from its top-of-the-line turbines, which represent the majority of blades the company has sold to date in the U.S.. Its troubles don't end there. A year ago, the company bought a controlling stake in a large German turbine manufacturer, REpower Systems AG, in one of India's biggest overseas acquisitions. ...Now, Suzlon can't get its hands on the blueprints. Hamstrung by a German corporate law, Suzlon must offer to buy out minority shareholders before it can demand REpower's designs. It's unlikely that the company could make a tender offer until 2009, say people with knowledge of the companies. ...Mr. Kher blamed the cracks on the Midwest's unexpectedly violent changes in wind direction. Though Mr. Tanti says that only 45 blades have cracked, Suzlon says it will add an extra lamination layer to almost all of the blades it has shipped to the U.S. To repair cracked blades and reinforce the rest, the company expects to spend $30 million.

As wind power becomes more common, its unpredictability becomes more of a problem. Sudden drops in wind speed can send grid operators scrambling to cover the shortfall and even cause blackouts; unexpected surges can leave conventional power plants idling, incurring costs and spewing pollution to no purpose. ...When wind farms were less common, grid controllers could essentially ignore their varying output, as it was all but indistinguishable from natural fluctuations in consumer use.

Work on a transformer and cable housings to bring offshore wind power to Germany's mainland for the first time is on course for a likely start in October, utility E.ON's network division said on Monday. The alpha ventus wind park, also known as Borkum West and situated some 45 km north of the island of Borkum near the German-Dutch border, will be Germany's first such venture. "This wind park will probably start in October as the first of its kind in the North Sea," E.ON Netz said in a statement. Once the plant becomes operational, it will form the foundation to research and implement some 30 or more pending projects in the German North and Baltic Seas territories.

Britain's first mobile wind farm could be built off the Scottish coast under an ambitious plan to stop turbines blighting the countryside by mooring them miles out to sea. Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) is in talks with Blue H, a Dutch company, to build a floating turbine platform that would be anchored to the seabed between Skye and the Uists. If the pilot scheme is successful, dozens more could be sited off the Scottish coast, thanks to new technology that allows turbines to be moored in waters up to 1,000ft deep. The new generation of turbines - which resemble small oil rigs - can be towed so far out to sea that they cannot be seen from the shore. ..."We want to get this technology working because Scotland's continental shelf drops off very quickly and we have very limited potential for shallow offshore wind. ..."

But state officials do not have a clear picture on how readily the state's electricity transmission infrastructure could accommodate the added load - a proposed 2,500 megawatts in the Lower Peninsula and 520 in the UP - from new wind-generating sources. A 2006 report from MPSC found that barring "significant enhancements," existing electric generation and transmission capacity would be insufficient to meet reliability standards in the Lower Peninsula by 2009. The MPSC is working on a study with transmission-owning companies to determine the cost of updating Michigan's transmission system. "If we do this smart, and that's a big leap of faith right there, where we see the wind being developed is where they need to build transmission anyway," said Joseph Welch, president and CEO of Novi-based ITC Holdings Corp.

Wind 2008 -- the not so good news -- The Energy Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is the independent system operator that manages the region's grid with oversight by the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT). As SGN reported in March 2008 (see Smart Grid News article link below), ERCOT operators had to react promptly on February 26 to balance load through demand response (DR) because of system reliability problems caused by wind intermittency. But systems reliability was not the only issue caught in the headlights by this event. The Wall Street Journal also spotlighted the economic impact; namely that the unexpected loss of wind generation caused wholesale power prices to soar from $299 per MWH to $1,055 per MWH in West Texas.

In some parts of the state, from Cape Cod to the Berkshires, wind turbines are springing up to power municipal offices, homes, and businesses as a push for cheap alternatives to fossil-fuel energy continues to mount. But in the suburbs west of Boston, where green sentiments often run deep, one major hurdle stands in the way of environmental advocates and energy cost cutters - insufficient wind speeds. ...The Stow Board of Selectmen has discussed building a wind turbine on town property, but its chairman, Stephen Dungan, said the panel found local wind speeds were simply not high enough to make it pay off. "Basically, the option wasn't there," he said.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced that DOE will invest up to $13.7 million, over three years (Fiscal Years 2008-2010), for 11 university-led projects that will focus on developing advanced solar photovoltaic (PV) technology manufacturing processes and products. These projects are integral to President Bush's Solar America Initiative, which aims to make solar energy cost-competitive with conventional forms of electricity by 2015.

A new proposal for a wind farm off the coast of Martha's Vineyard is promising what people on all sides of the Cape Wind debate can embrace: turbines in a location where nobody has to see them. Blue H, a subsidiary of a Dutch company, announced this week that it wants to build 120 floating wind turbines in deep water 23 miles off Martha's Vineyard and sought government approval to install a test turbine. Company officials then joined with the main opposition group fighting Cape Wind's proposed wind farm off Cape Cod in touting Blue H as a viable alternative that would be far from ferry lanes and invisible from shore. "If you had a horse and buggy and then the automobile was invented, it makes sense to embrace the technology moving forward," said Blue H spokesman Martin T. Reilly.