Italian finance police have arrested two prominent businessmen - including one with ties to a former investor in the Cape Wind project in Nantucket - in the wind energy sector on charges of fraud, reports the Financial Times. Arrested were Oreste Vigorito, head of the IVPC energy company and president of Italy's National Association of Wind Energy, and Vito Nicastri, a Sicilian business associate, according to the article. According to the European Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, Oreste Vigorito has ties to Brian Caffyn, a former investor in the Cape Wind project, which has been criticized as a poor investment for taxpayers, reports Dakota Voice.

Shares in Iberdrola SA (IBE.MC) plunged Wednesday as its announcement to increase its capital by EUR1.325 billion raises questions about the viability of its divestment program. Iberdrola Wednesday said it will issue 250 million new ordinary shares, at a price of EUR5.30 each. That increases the company's capital by 4.9977%.

Nobuo Tanaka, executive director of the International Energy Agency, says it is "inevitable" that the manufacturing of renewable energy components - mainly solar modules and wind turbines - will move to China and, to a lesser extent, India. "The PV cells made there are not of as high a quality yet [as those made in Europe] but they will get there." This view is echoed by George Frampton, former chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and a member of the Obama campaign's transition team. He says: "There is a very strong momentum. And it's not just because of the cost, it's also that I'm not that optimistic that this market is going to boom in the US."

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.

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.

Wind turbine blade maker LM Glasfiber Group has announced that it will lay off up to 600 workers at plants in Europe and the United States. The Danish company plans to cut a fifth of its domestic workforce - 450 employees - and to close one of its two blade plants in Little Rock, Arkansas, with the loss of 150 jobs. ...Despite this, the company stressed it is confident in the long-term outlook for the wind turbine business.

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.

Falling prices for European carbon emissions permits could stunt investment in the renewable energy sector both within and outside Europe, but the credit crunch continues to have a greater impact. ...A falling carbon price could worsen the economics of renewable energy further, as falling demand for carbon emissions permits in a deepening recession pulls down carbon prices, benefiting fossil fuels.

Theolia SA, the French wind-power company part-owned by General Electric Co., dropped the most in more than five years in Paris trading after abandoning financial and operational targets. ..."Theolia is getting short of cash,'' Exane BNP Paribas analyst Yohann Terry, who has an "underperform'' rating on the shares, said today in a report. "We believe it will be difficult for the company to create significant value'' from its pipeline of wind-power projects.

Big American utilities are slashing their investments in alternative energy. Florida Power & Light has cut its planned investment in wind power next year by 400 megawatts. Duke Energy of North Carolina has lopped $50m off its budget for solar power. And on October 31st VeraSun Energy, one of America's biggest ethanol producers, caught out by gyrations in the prices of corn and petrol (gasoline), filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In the European Union the price of carbon permits has fallen from a high of almost €30 in July to around €20, making clean-tech investments less attractive.

William Kovacs, at U.S. Chamber of Commerce, warns: "Anyone who thinks you can have a cap-and-trade system in which trillions of dollars of new securities will be traded is just not paying attention to what's happening on Wall Street." Meanwhile, prices in emerging carbon markets (Carbon Finance) globally have held up better than in other commodities markets, but financial analysts caution that these markets are too immature to provide a safe haven for investors (Reuters). Though sales of carbon emission offset credits--investment in green projects in lieu of direct emissions reductions--have been strong, some experts still express concern over the quality of oversight (WSJ) these projects receive.

Morgan Stanley cut its rating on Vestas to ``underweight'' from ``equal-weight'' yesterday, citing ``early signs of softening demand among small developers'' and the recent increase in raw material prices, particularly steel, which it said would constrain profit margins.

Investors in alternative energy are confident entrepreneurs will find ways to drum up finance without deepening the global credit crisis. Many people fear that as many alternative, low-carbon energy sources are more expensive than gas and oil, developing them will add to the current economic problems, but investors say projects will be aided by private capital. ...A diversified energy mix would help keep the lid on costs, executives told the London conference. "We must keep ideology out of our choices," said Pierre Gadonneix, chief executive of French utility EDF , who said the supply mix must include hydropower, nuclear, wind and high-efficiency coal and gas.

Wind turbines generate electricity very irregularly, because the wind itself is inconsistent. Therefore wind turbines always need backup power from fossil fuels to keep the electricity grid in balance. Gas turbines are the best way to do this. They are able to respond quickly and push power production when wind generators stop suddenly. They can be turned on and off almost instantly, whereas traditional coal-fired plants need to be maintained in a very inefficient standby mode if they are to respond to large fluctuations in power demand. A proliferation of windmills, then, can become a windfall for gas sellers. Just look at the cases of Spain and Germany, Europe's leading producers of wind power.

Wind power may be one of the cleaner, greener energy sources available, but turbine and blade failures point to dangers that were not anticipated, says Michael Connellan

The idea was that, in the intervening years, electricity produced with renewable energy technologies would grow to the point that the shift away from nuclear would hardly be noticed. That, though, is looking increasingly unlikely. Despite a decade of massive investment and generous programs established to promote wind, solar and biomass power generation, green energy sources make up just 14 percent of the country's energy supply. Even if that were to double in the near future, the lion's share of Germany's energy consumption would have to come from elsewhere. Without nuclear power, "elsewhere" in Germany necessarily means coal-fired power plants.

The grand U.S. ambitions of Indian wind-turbine manufacturer Suzlon Energy Ltd. are facing mounting problems. The Indian company -- the world's fifth-largest wind-turbine maker by sales -- earlier this year acknowledged that 65 giant blades on turbines it had sold in the U.S. Midwest were cracking because of the extreme gusts in the region. The company is reinforcing 1,251 blades, almost the total it has sold in the U.S. Now, other problems are emerging, in part because the company quickly ramped up U.S. sales to meet burgeoning demand for alternative energy. ...

Conglomerate Siemens AG, wracked by a wide-ranging corruption scandal, will cut up to 4 percent of its work force worldwide, or about 17,200 jobs, a pair of newspapers reported Saturday. The Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported that the Munich-based company was set to shed the jobs -- mostly white-collar and administrative -- without citing any sources. ...The warning was a surprise for the conglomerate, whose diverse products include trams, turbines and telecommunications equipment, given that it had said in January that sales were expected to double the pace of the global economy.

Stocks of companies that generate electricity from solar or wind power -- or make the equipment to do so -- soared during the last three years. But the global credit crunch, higher prices for raw materials like polysilicon used in solar panels, and cuts in government subsidies to consumers, such as in Germany last month, have made investors much warier. High oil prices, analysts say, can't compensate for all that. "Some months ago, it was still true that a rising tide lifts all the boats," said Thomas Germann, an analyst at Zuercher Kantonalbank. "But investors are now scrutinizing what's going on at the company level, because cost efficiency has become more important." ..."The easy money has been made," said Jean Ryan, who oversees three funds with about €2 billion in assets at KBC Asset Management International Ltd., a unit of Belgium-based KBC Group NV.

Sapec SA, the third-largest supplier of crop-protection products on the Iberian Peninsula, plans to raise cash for construction of U.S. wind farms by selling other alternative-energy projects after they are completed this year. ...The wind farm projects in the U.S. are facing delays amid uncertainty about the extension of renewable-energy tax credits and problems getting the turbines from Spain, according to Velge. Naturener, which had planned to install 210 megawatts of capacity in Montana this year, will complete only 107 megawatts of the Glacier Wind project this year. The first project in Canada will not be completed until 2010, rather than in 2009.