The group includes 10 existing hydroelectric facilities that have been or will be upgraded, nine new wind facilities and two biomass facilities, the organizations say. The contract awards total approximately $295 million and will be paid out over a 10-year period as performance incentives for these facilities to produce and deliver electric energy to the state grid. According to NYSERDA and the commission, performance incentives will average approximately $15 per MWh.

How much money wind projects blow into local communities is still up in the air - and it could be changing as the state Senate and Assembly work on Article X, a bill to regulate energy production in New York. State Sen. George Winner, R-Elmira, is part of the conference committee comprised of Senate and Assembly members to come up with a joint bill. He said the two bodies are "very far apart" in terms of coming to terms on a joint offering. The bulk of the bills deal with natural gas and clean air standards, but wind energy could be impacted as well.

Interviews with architects, engineers and energy experts on Wednesday suggest that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's proposal to place wind turbines atop the city's skyscrapers and bridges, as well as off the coastline of Queens and Brooklyn, would be complicated and expensive and barely begin to meet the growth in demand for electricity that is expected in the coming years. ...Even if Mr. Bloomberg could find investors willing to build turbines capable of generating 1,000 megawatts of electricity, experts said, operators of the city's grid would be able to count on only 100 megawatts, or less than 1 percent of peak demand.

It was the threat of Article X legislation that prompted Town of Hamlin Supervisor Dennis Roach to speed up the timeline for the town's Wind Tower Committee's work. The ...The committee was originally given a timeline that extended to December but was summarily moved up by Roach when talk of Article X began surfacing among state representatives. Roach has consistently said he wants to have the town's regulations in place before the state made its own determination on sitings for turbines. ..."We agree that we have to do something to generate more electric power so we can reduce utility costs for businesses and consumers, but we have to go about it in the right way. As we look at legislation to reauthorize Article X, we need to make sure that local governments have a sufficient amount of input into the siting process if a generating facility is proposed in their community," said Maziarz in a press release.

ALBANY — To some Upstate residents, massive windmills are “a blight on the landscape.” To environmentalists and energy companies, they are a low-cost energy source that can reduce society's dependence on oil and gas. The two sides squared off Tuesday at an Assembly hearing over the direction of the state's renewable energy programs. One thing both sides could agree on: this is a fight that is rippling across New York.

The town of Cherry Valley's Citizens Committee on Renewable and Alternative Energy is sponsoring a presentation next week by town of Caroline supervisor Don Barber. Caroline town officials have put together a proposal to build a 10-turbine, 2.5 mega-watt generating facility that would be financed, owned and operated by the town. The town would issue bonds to finance the project, and once those bonds are paid off, revenue generated by the turbines could be used to reduce property taxes. ...The smaller scale would address some of the residents' concerns about the visual impact of the industrialscale turbines, Garretson said.

Most New Yorkers could care less about a ruling that an administrative law judge could make on the Iberdrola-Energy East merger as early as Friday. But the decision could have huge implications for upstate New Yorkers and their energy usage. ...Staff at the department, who provide guidance and recommendations to the five-person Public Service Commission that must ultimately approve or deny the merger, have argued that the deal does not provide the public with enough benefits and that it could cause disruption to the state's wholesale electric market. Agency staff believe Iberdrola will hold too much sway over the state's wholesale electric market if it owns a substantial amount of generation in the state, which is why the company has been pushed to sell Energy East's power plants and divest itself of its wind business in New York.

Whitley wants to import more hydropower from Quebec and foster more wind power in New York. He said existing transmission lines need to be upgraded to carry more clean energy into and across the state to places like New York City that need more power. "Let's start working on our infrastructure," he said. "Studies show that these investments will pay for themselves."

Public Service Commission Chairman Garry Brown has agreed to meet with U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer about Iberdrola SA's $4.5 billion acquisition of Energy East Corp. Schumer wrote Brown a letter yesterday requesting the meeting, saying he was upset with an administrative law judge's recommended decision in the case earlier in the week. The judge, Rafael Epstein, had recommended that Brown and the commission's four other members only approve the [Iberdrola] deal with significant conditions ...

CLARKSTOWN — Wind power will now help to keep streetlights and municipal buildings lit.

The alternative energy source would cost the town about $12,000 more a year, a minimal impact because of rising gas prices, said Amy Mele, deputy town attorney for purchasing.

"It's not about savings, but more a policy statement," Mele said. "We're trying to make it a more competitive form of energy."

Green companies are in retreat, with a wave of staff layoffs and production cuts that could have dire consequences for governments' efforts to fight climate change by quickly bringing low-carbon power projects on stream. Siemens, Clipper Windpower and even BP are among the big names that say they are reacting to a slowdown in the clean energy sector, which had hitherto seen massive growth.

For the first time ever, the House on Friday passed a plan to combat climate change, a top priority of President Obama's that Rep. Brian Higgins said could rescue the Western New York economy. The bill's opponents, however, were vehement in their contention that the bill could break the bank of the nation's consumers. ...The bill now moves on to the Senate, where its prospects are murky.

A grass roots coalition of nearly 100 citizens from New York, Vermont, and other states have filed a federal Anti-Trust Complaint alleging that an international cartel comprised of foreign and domestic business entities have conspired to eliminate competition in the newly emerging U.S. wind energy sector.

WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- Multiple reports and studies, especially those published in the last year, suggest the United States, specifically the East Coast, has great potential for offshore wind. The politicized debate over whether to develop wind power offshore has dragged on since the late 1990s, when the first project was proposed in Cape Cod, Mass., off the Nantucket Sound. Since then there have been several other proposals, none of which has been completely approved.

The Cohocton Wind Farm Controversy continues -- this time, over print reports the turbines were not producing power. ...Local print reports quoted an official from the New York Independent Service Operator saying even though the turbines are spinning, the energy wasn't actually going into the power grid.

With a wave of wind energy seemingly about to hit Western New York, many of the area's towns have a message for Albany: They think they're handling it pretty well on their own. That's in the wake of legislation passed at the end of the State Senate's and Assembly's spring sessions that drafted new rules for siting power plants - including large wind power projects. ...Merle Draper, the supervisor of the Orleans County Town of Shelby, said: "If the ability to control the siting is taken from the local municipality . . . we're again a big backyard for New York City."

Determining which way the wind blows has rarely been as important to a politician as it is to Gov. David Paterson. Paterson's ambitious goal of increasing renewable energy to 25 percent of New York's power by 2013 will hinge on wind turbines. Since most of New York's renewable energy comes from hydroelectric power plants with little capacity to grow, and the pace of growth in solar energy has gone at less than light speed, with only 15 megawatts of installed capacity to date, the wind industry will likely account for most of the desired growth in so-called clean energy. Local companies like AWS Truewind and MSE Power Systems, both founded in Albany, are poised to profit from New York's promotion of wind energy.

This is a story about two men who forged a friendship at a nuclear power plant protest and then went on to collaborate on several sustainable energy projects, including three of the best known modern hydro projects in Vermont, over a 30-year period. Recently, the two separately embarked on wind projects in New York and Vermont. The fate of these projects couldn’t be more different: The New York wind turbines will be built this summer, while the East Haven Wind Farm in the Northeast Kingdom is effectively dead.