A Government planning expert says the county is currently on course to achieve less than 20% of its target for generating electricity from renewable sources by next year. ...Now Government planning inspector David Cullingford says the actual working capacity is only likely to be about 40 megawatts - less than a fifth of the target set out in the emerging Regional Spatial Strategy (RSS).

Hundreds of thousands of consumers are being misled by the green tariffs offered by power companies to boost renewable energy, says a report due out this week. The tariffs do virtually nothing to promote new renewable supplies and can be costly and confusing, according to the Carbon Accountability Programme, set up by environmentalists in Edinburgh. It accuses the six leading power companies of using "greenwash" to make their products seem more attractive.

The British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) has agreed to scale down its calculation for the amount of harmful carbon dioxide emission that can be eliminated by using wind turbines to generate electricity instead of burning fossil fuels such as coal or gas. The move is a serious setback for the advocates of wind power ...A wind farm industry source admitted: "It's not ideal for us. It's the result of pressure by the anti-wind farm lobby."

The storm over the city wind farm has still to blow out - despite opponents running out of UK options for defeating the plan. They say they may turn to the European courts after they were refused leave to appeal to the House of Lords. The company behind the proposed seven wind turbines at Petsoe Manor Farm, Emberton, Your Energy, welcomed the decision by the Lords appeal committee effectively upholding Milton Keynes Council's approval of the project.

Royal Dutch Shell has become the second big energy company to abandon the UK wind-energy sector in the last month. ...Shell said: "The focus for new projects will be in North America where we can benefit from the availability of undeveloped wind resources to deliver wind energy at what we expect to be a competitive cost."

Homes and businesses risk being left in the dark if governments get too sidetracked by wind power. A House of Lords report yesterday warned that over-reliance on wind power could prove risky and costly. It said that nuclear energy was a much cheaper and more effective, low carbon solution. ..."Current policies would take the UK into uncharted territory, with a dependence on intermittent supply unprecedented elsewhere in Europe.

The cost of offshore wind farms has continued to soar, Centrica said, leading the company to review the economics of its £4bn wind power investment programme. The spiralling costs of offshore wind threaten to derail the government's renewable energy plans, which rely heavily on offshore turbines because of the difficulty and delays in obtaining planning permission for onshore wind farms.

Government plans for Britain to become a world leader in clean energy technology suffered a double setback yesterday after BP said that it was abandoning the country's wind energy industry and pulling out of a competition to build a demonstration carbon-capture and storage plant. ..."We came to the conclusion that we could no longer put together a winning consortium," the spokesman said. He added that BP was dropping plans to invest in UK windfarm projects in favour of better returns in the industry in the United States.

When it comes to going green, BP's policy appears to be a case of 'Beyond Britain'. The UK's pre-eminent energy company yesterday confirmed it has shelved plans to invest in wind power or carbon-capture technology in this country. Instead, BP's wind investments will be targeted on the US, where there are opportunities for greater economies of scale because of the sheer amount of empty land.

BP has dropped all plans to build wind farms and other renewable schemes in Britain and is instead concentrating the bulk of its $8bn (£5bn) renewables spending programme on the US, where government incentives for clean energy projects can provide a convenient tax shelter for oil and gas revenues. The decision is a major blow to the prime minister, Gordon Brown, who has promised to sweep away all impediments to ensure Britain is at the forefront of the green energy revolution. BP and Shell - which has also pulled out of renewables in Britain - are heavily influential among investors.

More than 13 GW of energy capacity are stuck in the planning process, enough to power at least 7.5m homes, add some 17 per cent to UK electricity generation, and take the country half-way down the road to the 2020 renewable energy targets, reports The Independent. But as the government-backed Planning Bill designed to address bottlenecks in the regime moves to the next stage in its progress through Parliament this week, experts say the new legislation will do little to ease the congestion.

The region's rural landscapes face being blighted by wind farms unless the Government develops a co-ordinated approach to renewable energy projects, it has been claimed. The criticism from two North-East MPs follows a big rise in the number of proposals for wind farms submitted to local councils. Plans for at least ten wind farms, mainly in the Tees Valley and east Durham areas, have been put forward.

Britain has officially achieved planning consent for enough wind farms to meet its 2010 target of 10% renewable electricity, it was announced today. ...Some 25% of all wind energy applications go on to the appeal stage, with around half then being approved. ...The BWEA is therefore lobbying for measures to be added to the Bill to allow the Secretary of State to "call in" a planning application for a decision by the Infrastructure Planning Commission even if it is less than 50MW is size if it has taken too long to secure a local planning decision.

Royal Dutch Shell completed its withdrawal from the UK wind-energy sector after quietly selling out of the last project it had in this country. ...Shell said: “Our focus for new projects is North America. We are committed to wind projects that make economic sense

Last week Britain committed itself to cutting greenhouse gases by 80 per cent. This week Gordon Brown will claim the UK is now a world leader in wind power. An Observer investigation reveals his hopes could be blown wildly off course. No country has tried to switch so fast to renewable energy - but rising costs and technical problems mean that, without urgent action and cash, the targets cannot be met.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has been leaving about 10,000 computers switched on overnight. ...This means the overnight powering of FCO computers in a year has been roughly equivalent to the average annual output of a 1.7Mw wind turbine, or the electricity usage of several hundred homes. ..."It has been our assessment that the risk of lost productivity and the risk to national security that this policy avoids outweighed its cost," said Munn in the answer given on 15 September.

Energy firm ScottishPower Renewables (SPR) has set an ambitious new target for wind-farm development by revealing that it wants to increase capacity by 80%. It was previously committed to producing 1,000 megawatts of renewable energy by 2010 but has raised that to 1,800MW by 2012. As the majority of its wind farms are in Scotland, the firm says this will help the Scottish Government achieve its aim of generating 31% of the country's electricity demand from renewable sources by 2011 and 50% by 2020.

Scotland will miss its target to generate half its electricity from renewable sources by 2020 unless the government fixes the country's transmission problems quickly, a senior executive of a leading wind farm developer will tell a major energy conference this week. Dr Keith MacLean, head of policy and public affairs at Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE), who will address the Scottish Council for Development and Industry's Scotland's Energy Future conference in Edinburgh on Tuesday, told the Sunday Herald: "Without an adequate electricity grid system to plug into, our renewable ambitions won't be realised."

Denmark is proud of the fact that a fifth of its electricity comes from wind. But Hugh Sharman, an energy consultant, says this figure should be treated with caution. Sifting through the charts in his crow's nest office overlooking the Jutland peninsula in Denmark, a different picture emerges. "Every time the wind is high, the exports are high. Every time the wind is low, of course there are few exports". Mr Sharman says more than half of Denmark's wind power is exported - so it only actually uses nine percent of the wind energy it generates. If the Danes couldn't do this, their system wouldn't work. The UK, however, doesn't have this option.