Lawmakers heard hours of often emotional testimony Thursday on bills that highlight growing tensions over the use of Maine's abundant wind and water resources. Much of the debate focused on the roles municipalities and local residents play when wind-energy companies and water bottlers come to town. Dozens of people turned out to oppose a controversial and short-lived proposal that aimed to speed up development of industrial-scale wind power by limiting municipalities' ability to control where massive turbines are located.

Concerned about the possible effects of proposed wind power legislation on their property rights, some Fredericksburg area landowners have voiced opposition to a bill by State Senator Troy Fraser that would allow the Gillespie County Commissioners' Court to restrict wind farm construction. "Once the bill was filed, the phones started lighting up." Fraser said. "We need to gauge both support and opposition."

In a typically airless conference room in downtown Baltimore yesterday, the Public Service Commission fast-tracked a proposal for a wind farm in Western Maryland. "Fast," though, is a relative term given that developers have as long as three years to start construction and five for the first turbine to actually start harnessing those mountain breezes and turning them into electricity.

Senator Troy Fraser (R-Horseshoe Bay) filed legislation on Monday to authorize the Gillespie County Commissioners Court to regulate the construction of wind energy electric generating facilities in the unincorporated areas of the county. Senate Bill 1226 specifically will allow Gillespie County to prohibit or restrict the location of a facility in all or part of the county.

According to Tyler Fairbank, CEO of EOS Ventures, a renewable energy development company based in Hancock, four criteria must be acceptable before a wind project can move ahead: wind resource, electrical grid connectivity, community acceptance, and a sound financial structure. "If there is a big red flag in any of these four areas, there is a pretty low probability that anything is going to happen," Fairbank said. "You can very easily have a project that makes sense from a wind resource and electrical environment perspective, but the community is not going to accept it. That is a key evaluation that really needs to be looked at."

Two years after Maryland legislators passed a law designed to breeze wind power projects through regulatory reviews, the state still has no active wind farms and the opponents of the 2007 bill are still fighting the change. ...Former state senator and former Frostburg mayor John Bambacus told a panel of legislators that the new law "totally gutted the regulatory process." Bambacus says public input is exceptionally important because wind turbines "are not benign structures," noting some are as "tall as the Washington monument."

"I think that if they want to get something going, they could do a partial lifting of the orange zone and allow the capacity that is available today to be produced by wind energy," Estill said in a recent interview. "If there's a problem with any of the nuclear units, as there often is, or if the refurbishment is started on another nuclear unit, to me, it's pretty darn good odds that not everything is going to be producing at the same time and they would be able to use the existing [transmission] capacity," Estill said.

Municipalities will lose the power to decide how close wind turbines can be to residential properties and environmentally sensitive areas under proposed green-energy legislation being tabled Monday. The new rules, a blow to NIMBYism, will also ensure that developers of wind and other renewable-energy projects get construction permits within six months. It's all part of Premier Dalton McGuinty's plan to streamline approvals for such projects ...

Department of Conservation officials are being told to ensure greater transparency occurs within the organisation, after details of a controversial agreement were allegedly kept confidential. A negotiation document between Doc and Meridian Energy on the electricity company's proposed $2 billion Project Hayes wind farm drew criticism of Doc last week when details came to light almost two years after the agreement was made.

One of the decisions faced by state officials as they consider the revised Desert Claim Wind Power Project is whether to overrule Kittitas County government's April 2005 rejection of an older version of the wind farm planned for eight miles north of Ellensburg. One could say the Desert Claim project, the state and the county have a "history" in regard to the project.

Wind farms generating enough electricity to supply three million homes could be established off the Scottish coast after The Crown Estate approved key preliminary bids from a clutch of power companies. ...However, experts have questioned whether the wind farms will ever be built without fresh government incentives to make them more viable. Industry analysts say that the cost of building offshore wind farms stands at about £3million per megawatt of installed capacity, suggesting that the price of building 6,000MWs could top £18billion.

Sen. George Edwards and Delegate Wendell Beitzel are trying both approaches by filing a handful of bills to repeal all or parts of a 2007 law that streamlined the regulatory and review process for industrial wind turbine facilities. Edwards' Senate Bill 583, cross-filed with House Bill 605 by Beitzel, would mandate that any industrial wind energy facility go through the full review process ..."There's a lot of controversy back home over whether there's enough opportunity now for input from the public," Edwards told the Times-News this week while in Annapolis. "We felt that one way to try to resolve that is to try to repeal (SB) 566 and go back to what was in place prior to passage of SB 566, which sort of short-cuts the process."

Representatives from enXco hope their reconfigured Desert Claim Wind Farm, planned for 5,200 acres about 8 miles northwest of Ellensburg will get the go-ahead from the state Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council (EFSEC). Desert Claim Project Director David Steeb said enXco would submit its revised application for the $330 million, 95-turbine wind farm to EFSEC on Friday.

Two Kansas House of Representative bills being heard in the committee on energy and utilities have sparked opposition by local government officials. House bills 2043 and 2051, dealing with the regulation of wind and solar energy, would allow developers to build renewable energy plants without regard for already-established local zoning regulations.

Acres of solar-electric panels installed near communities that use lots of power in the summer could be an alternative to a controversial and costly upgrade of the transmission system in southern and central Maine, a Portland-based energy company is asserting. GridSolar LLC suggests erecting solar panels in 25-acre fields, initially around the midcoast and Lewiston-Auburn. The locations would coincide with areas that Central Maine Power Co. has identified as being most prone to future blackouts and reliability problems, GridSolar said.

Fresh from beginning the formal application process with the West Virginia Public Service Commission, US WindForce will meet tonight with area residents as part of its ongoing public outreach efforts on the Pinnacle Wind Farm near Keyser. The Community Advisory Panel for the Pinnacle project will meet at 6 p.m. at the WindLea Conference and Banquet Center. The meeting is open to the public.

For the last decade, when most people have thought of renewable energy in Texas, they have usually thought of wind. But this year, solar and other forms of renewable energy are starting to get a place at the table at the Legislature. Legislation including incentives and rebates could pave the way ...Today, legislators and environmentalists will hold statewide news conferences to draw attention to solar energy.

Landscape gardener and campaigner Jan Dixon hopes to gather 1000 signatures for a petition which asks the Government to consider halting all building of wind farms until national rules can be set. Mrs Dixon says though the Resource Management Act gives some protections, it only takes into account individual projects and not the effects that multiple developments will have on an area over time.

Wind farm building should halt until New Zealand has national guidelines about wind turbines, says Palmerston North woman Jan Dixon. She's starting a petition to the Government to plead for national guidelines on: * Minimum distances turbines can be from houses * Maximum saturation of an area's skyline * "Iconic" areas where wind turbines shouldn't be built. Until these guidelines are established by the Government, she wants a moratorium on wind farm developments.

After much discussion Monday about the benefits and disadvantages of selling a parcel of town-owned land known as the Blair Lot, between Routes 7 and 43 (New Ashford and Hancock Roads), the Selectmen unanimously approved letting the voters have the final say at town meeting in May. ...He said the land has the potential to provide an income of $20,000 to $30,000 to the town every 15 years or so from timber harvests and could be a future site for wind turbines.