Lobbyist pressure will not weigh on a U.N. panel's decision whether to award carbon finance worth about 100 million euros ($144 million) to Chinese wind power projects, said the chair of the panel on Tuesday. ...The issue has caused long-running tension between the panel and project developers and brokers about the speed of approvals in the $6.5 billion global carbon offset market. Under the U.N.-led Kyoto Protocol's clean development mechanism, rich countries can buy rights to pollute by funding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in developing nations.

Spain plans to change rules on state aid for renewable energy generators, an industry ministry spokesman said on Friday, arousing fears in the sector that its lucrative subsidies may shrink. Under a new regulatory framework that has not yet been finally decided, the government could also change its targets for installed wind capacity, which are now at 20 gigawatts by 2012, rising to 40 GW in 2020, the spokesman said.

Several mob-linked wind projects later were found to be poorly built, and some are now off-line. "This is the amazing thing, that developers got public money to build wind farms which did not produce electricity," Roberto Scarpinato, a veteran anti-Mafia prosecutor in Sicily, told the Financial Times newspaper.

The green energy sector has a lot riding on 2009. Policymakers from Washington to Beijing have pledged billions of dollars in "cleantech" investment to jump-start the depressed global economy and create millions of new low-carbon jobs. ...As with the solar industry, wind power has been hit by a sudden slowdown in private sector investment as credit has dried up and the price of oil has fallen from its mid-2008 high. The industry hopes public spending will help fill the gap until the global economy gets back on its feet.

An Industry Ministry official said the energy watchdog would check how many wind and solar power plants were installed in time to receive full subsidies before official aid was cut. "There are some signs that there may be fraud in the installation and functioning of wind and solar parks," the official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters.

...global investment bank Lehman Brothers agreed to advise and finance the $700m Cape Wind project, the US’s first offshore wind farm located near Nantucket Island and a landmark cause for many environmentalists. This March, Goldman Sachs sold its investment – redubbed Horizon Wind Energy – to Portugal’s largest utility, EDP, for more than $2.1bn, making a profit of $900m. But Lehman Brothers’ project, despite early state-level approvals, has been stuck in bureaucratic purgatory from which it is unlikely to emerge soon. The problem: Nantucket’s millionaire residents oppose the wind farm, which they claim would ruin their ocean views. The contrast between the outcome of the Zilkha investment and the Cape Wind project illustrates the unpredictability of the clean technology sector. “There is no doubt in my mind that renewable energy is like other tech start-ups, where some will succeed and many will not.”

The European Union has taken the lead on many climate change issues - from ratifying the Kyoto Protocol to passing laws to require and encourage the development of renewable energy. Why, then, are so many European energy companies looking to invest in the United States? For António Mexia, the chief executive of Energías de Portugal, the answer is simple. "The United States is the fastest-growing market in the world for wind power," he said. "If we want to be a leader, we have to be here." ..."In America you can put up a 200- or 300-megawatt wind park," Mexia said. "You can't do that in Europe" because of the lack of open space for such large wind farms. There is also more potential for growth in the United States, where wind farms account for barely 1 percent of installed generating capacity. In some EU countries, that figure is as high as 10 percent.

Canadian investors looking for exposure to the booming alternative energy sector have a handful of domestic players to choose from, but the local pickings are pretty slim and most of the companies are small. So why not look overseas, to one of the green behemoths that has sprung up on the international scene? ...The fast-growing U.S. wind power industry, driven by favourable government tax policy, is Vestas' largest current market. ...Some analysts are also urging caution over Vestas' high price. "We find the shares are fundamentally overvalued," said analyst Christian Nagstrup of Jyske Bank, a Danish financial institution. The biggest risk he sees at Vestas is a bottleneck in getting parts to build the turbines. Subcontractors have been slow in delivering key components, and that could slow delivery of complete turbines, Mr. Nagstrup said in a recent report.

Energias de Portugal plans to monetize about 650 MW of tax equity credits by the end of 2007 that it gained through its acquisition of Horizon Wind Energy from Goldman Sachs in July, Antonio Mexia, EDP CEO, told Platts Friday. On the eve of its $3-billion acquisition of Horizon Wind, EDP monetized the 722 MW of Horizon's operational wind farms by selling them for $700 million in deal facilitated by a Citigroup-led group of banks.

However, the wind power market has a long way to go before it catches up with the more established fossil-fired generation market in terms of capacity of plants and market penetration. This is partly due to the inadequate supply of essential components, rising installation costs and over-dependence on subsidies. ..."Long-term government incentives and installation rebate supports are expected to help wind power participants meet the heavy capital required for production and installation," observes Thaler. "To become independent of government subsidies, the market has to implement intense end-user marketing and increased output to match conventional fuels."

The European Commission was accused yesterday of a "grotesque" waste of taxpayers' money after it allocated funding for an organisation that exists to lobby Brussels. The lobby group, Friends of the Earth Europe, received £562,000 funding from the EU Commission last year. Its commission funding rose this year by 200,000 in order to meet "increased running costs." The group, which has a 25-strong staff in Brussels, is pre-eminent in lobbying the EU for tighter controls to combat global warming.

CHEERLEADERS for renewable energy are fond of pointing out that patches of desert receive enough energy each year from sunlight to power the entire world. But few deign to explain how the construction of the millions of solar cells required to convert that energy into electricity would be financed. Utility bosses and policymakers tend to dismiss wind and solar power as noble but expensive distractions, sustainable only through lavish subsidies. But new studies suggest that renewables might not be as dear as sceptics suspect...These figures, of course, rely on all sorts of questionable assumptions.

Since the extension of the production tax credit, European wind companies have been keener on investing in the U.S. market. Several of the largest turbine producers are now selling to U.S. developers for projects, and opening offices and manufacturing plants in the United States. The federal production tax credit was extended for two years in August 2005 by President Bush. It was set to expire on Dec. 31, 2007, but was extended as one of Congress' last acts and will now run through Dec. 31, 2008. The PTC provides a 1.5 cent per kilowatt hour credit, or 1.9 cents when inflation-adjusted, to energy facilities during the first 10 years of operation.

THESE should be heady times for Vestas, a Danish firm that makes more than a quarter of the world's wind turbines. The wind business is booming, and the company said last week that it had swung into profit in 2006, thanks to an 8% rise in revenue. But there is "significant unexploited production capacity", Vestas says, due to shortages of high-quality turbine components. Other companies grumble about a lack of gearboxes and bearings. Wind firms' worries echo those in the solar-power business, which is also booming but where a shortage of polysilicon has hampered growth. Silicon is made from sand, which is abundant, but there are not enough refineries to turn it into solar-grade polysilicon. As a result, prices for silicon contracts have more than doubled, to $70 or $80 per kilogram, in the past three years, says Jesse Pichel, an analyst at Piper Jaffray. In both industries demand has rocketed and supply cannot keep up. The wind business is growing by more than 30% a year worldwide, with America leading the way. (This week Energias de Portugal became the latest European utility to invest in American wind farms, with the $2.2 billion purchase of Horizon Wind Energy.) And when a solar incentive scheme took hold in Germany in 2004-05, demand in Europe roughly doubled, says Ron Kenedi of Sharp, the biggest solar-cell maker.

Policymakers have settled on 'emissions trading' as their favorite global-warming fix. But it isn't working.

March 12, 2007 issue - Global warming isn't the only debate that may be over. Governments and policymakers around the world also seem to have settled on a solution. "A responsible approach to solving this crisis," Al Gore said recently at New York University's Law School, would be "to authorize the trading of emissions ... globally." Emissions trading, also called carbon trading, is being expanded in the European Union and Japan. And in many places where it's yet to take hold, like Sacramento, Sydney and Beijing, politicians are embracing it. Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank and Europe's foremost political expert on global warming, predicts that the value of carbon credits in circulation, now about $28 billion, will climb to $40 billion by 2010.

This should be great news for the environment, but many experts have their doubts. The notion that emissions trading is going to make a significant dent in global warming is deeply flawed, they say. Current emissions-trading schemes have proved to be little more than a shell game, allowing polluters in the developed world to shift the burden of making cuts onto factories in the developing world.

Spain’s wind power industry said on Monday new government regulations would knock its growth on the head, while the industry minister accused the sector of defending oversized profits. Spain has almost 12,000 megawatts (MW) of wind generation and the government wants to reach 20,000 MW by 2010 as part of its renewable energy plan. Boosting renewable generation is key to Spain’s efforts to curb its greenhouse gas emissions, which have swollen by 50 percent since 1990, the base year for the Kyoto agreement on global warming. But the Industry Ministry wants to curb the premiums paid to wind generators and argues that these will be a burden on the consumer in future years.

Since the oil shocks of the 1970s, governments around the world have paid plenty of lip service to renewable energies such as wind and solar power. But only a few governments have been able to engineer policies that have begun to bring alternative energies into wider use. Renewable fuels provided 18% of the world’s total electricity supply in 2004, according to figures from the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based intergovernmental organization. Almost all of that, though, came from hydropower, a source with limited growth potential because of geographic constraints. The use of wind and solar power is growing, but they still generated only 1% of global electricity production in 2004, the latest year for which figures are available.

Spain plans to cut subsidies for wind power generation, while increasing support for other renewables. Under the proposals, wind generators would see their feed-in tariffs reduced from about €97 ($129) per megawatt hour to between €67 and €87/MWh. However, the government proposes boosting the level of support for other technologies, such as solar. “Wind power subsidies were exaggeratedly high,” said Spanish energy minister, Ignasi Nieto, “especially since the technology has developed in the last year and costs have fallen.”

PALMA DE MALLORCA, Spain: Spain will cut subsidies to wind-power plants following an overhaul of the way it calculates aid for renewable power sources, hurting earnings at utilities including Iberdrola, the world's largest producer of wind power.

Spain’s Industry Ministry plans to cut the premium on investment in wind energy installations by over 50 pct, Bolsacinco reported, citing unnamed sector sources. According to the website, Energy Secretary General Ignasi Nieto has now submitted the definitive regulations on the wind energy investment, proposing a premium of 17.4 eur per Mwh during the first five years of investment in a wind farm, which will then fall to 10 eur during the following 10 years.