The U.S. has become the world's biggest wind-power generator and of the electricity production added in the country last year, 42 percent came from wind turbines. But as more megawatts come on line, the problem of getting power from wind-swept plains to places where people actually live becomes more urgent.

U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) yesterday announced the selection of 53 new wind energy projects for up to $8.5 million in total DOE funding. ...Awards were announced in four topic areas: market acceptance, environmental impact, workforce development and distributed wind technology.

Wind power developers say they need a greater commitment to renewable energy policy and more money from the federal government, as the country leans on alternative energy producers to bolster the sagging economy. Industry leaders stressed the need for renewable energy standards at this week's American Wind Energy Association's WINDPOWER 2009 conference in Chicago.

Lost financing, low prices for natural gas and political uncertainty have stymied a potential boom in the U.S. wind power industry this year. Investment in new wind power capacity that exploded from $3 billion in 2005 to $17 billion in 2008 was projected to fall to $13 billion this year. The fallout for the U.S. industry, the world's largest producer of wind power at 28,000 Megawatts, could usher in a period of consolidation, analysts said.

A key part of President Obama's energy plan -- replacing fossil fuels with green alternatives -- is facing increasing opposition from an unlikely source: environmentalists. ..."We all want to be as green as we can be. But at what cost?" Richard Jolly of the Blue Mountain Alliance.

The US cannot attain energy independence by 2030, said a large majority of oil and gas executives recently surveyed by KPMG LLP's Global Energy Institute. Most surveyed said mass production of alternative energy simply is not viable in the short term. And while there is a marked shift in their acknowledgement of global warming, the majority does not support proposed regulations to stem carbon dioxide emissions.

Project delays and cancellations across the renewable energy industry mean that this year's gathering at the world's biggest annual wind energy conference and exhibition will be keen for word of stimulus funds to help get projects back on track. Investment in renewables has been delayed or even withdrawn as the credit crisis has stemmed the flow of capital.

We need to have a streamlined processand we absolutely must reduce our carbon footprintbut we can't afford to create new problems in our efforts to address existing ones by adding to species mortality and habitat fragmentation," cautions Al Manville, a wildlife ecologist at FWS. Renewable energy has a dark side that is not getting enough attention in the push to curb greenhouse gases, he says. "The renewable energy industry likes to tout themselves as green, but killing birds and bats, hugely fragmenting habitat, and adding to cumulative impacts to species is not green," he adds.

Wind turbines provide little of the grid's electricity today, so if a turbine farm or two are becalmed the grid will barely notice. But if wind provided, for example, 20 percent of the nation's electricity, some grid operators would need a quick way to shed some load, or at least defer it, to cope with calm conditions. With solar power there is an even greater potential need for flexibility: clouds could knock out hundreds of megawatts of supply in a few seconds. Some utilities learned 30 years ago how to shed load without blacking out whole neighborhoods.

For more than a decade, wind developers have been salivating over windy places like this, but balked at building turbines without transmission lines. And utilities wouldn't string the lines without the wind farms. ITC wants to break that impasse, with a $12 billion transmission project. "Who comes first, the generation or the line? That's been the problem that's probably plagued the transmission industry for the last 30 years. And that's why no transmission has been built," says Joe Dudak, a vice president of ITC.

The Obama administration wants to rebuild the national electric grid that delivers power to everyone's toasters and televisions. One reason is that the grid can't handle all the new solar and wind power the president wants to build to create a greener energy economy. Here's the problem: Solar and wind power are intermittent. Sometimes it's sunny, sometimes it's not, and it's the same for wind. But the grid needs constant and reliable sources of power.

Rep. Greg Walden said Saturday that an energy bill hailed by the Obama administration as a "jobs bill" is "an Oregon job killer." Speaking to TV cameras in front of White City's Biomass One site for recycling wood waste, The 2nd District Republican denounced the bill's definition of renewable energy.

The intent to prevent California's utilities from using out-of-state wind and solar generation to meet the new 33% RPS requirement is not obvious from the provisions of the bills. The exclusion results from a change in the requirements concerning the "delivery" of generation to California. Under California's current RPS legislation, in order to qualify as an eligible renewable energy resource such that California's utilities can count that generation against their RPS requirements, out-of-state generators are required to deliver the electricity to California simultaneous with its generation.

A National Park Service official has warned the Bureau of Land Management that approving dozens of solar power plants in southern Nevada could dramatically impact water supplies across the arid region. An estimated 63 large-scale solar projects are proposed for BLM lands in the region, and the plants are expected to use a large amount of groundwater to cool and wash solar panels.

The Interior Department issued long-awaited regulations Wednesday governing offshore renewable energy projects that would tap wind, ocean currents and waves to produce electricity. The framework establishes how leases will be issued and sets in place revenue sharing with nearby coastal states that will receive 27.5 percent of the royalties that will be generated from the electricity production.

[Dalton Utilities president and CEO Don Cope] said he had listened last week to a presentation by the Edison Electric Institute, an organization that all of the large, shareholder-owned utilities belong to, on the possibility of legislation capping carbon emissions produced by fossil fuels such as coal and oil. "Their estimate is that it will cost the average household in the United States between $3,000 and $6,000 per year," he said.

A westward dash to power electricity-hungry cities by cashing in on the desert's most abundant resource - sunshine - is clashing with efforts to protect the tiny pupfish and desert tortoise and stinginess over the region's rarest resource: water. ..."It is not in the public interest for BLM to approve plans of development for water-cooled solar energy projects in the arid basins of southern Nevada, some of which are already over-appropriated," Jon Jarvis, director of the Park Service's Pacific West Region, wrote to the BLM director in Nevada.

The push to add more renewable wind and solar megawatts to the U.S. electric mix will force changes in the way the power grid operates to keep electricity flowing reliably, said an industry watchdog on Thursday. ...U.S. legislators are also discussing a federal mandate.

The vast expansion of wind and solar power planned by the Obama administration and congressional leaders is fraught with challenges for the nation's aged electricity network, grid monitors with the North American Electric Reliability Corp. say. But a NERC report released today does not call for a slowdown in deployment of renewable energy.

The Obama administration wants to reduce oil consumption, increase renewable energy supplies and cut carbon dioxide emissions in the most ambitious transformation of energy policy in a generation. But the world's oil giants are not convinced that it will work. Even as Washington goes into a frenzy over energy, many of the oil companies are staying on the sidelines, balking at investing in new technologies favored by the president, or even straying from commitments they had already made.