A single wind farm located in a scenic setting outside this rural Canadian town was featured on a postage stamp three years ago. Today, the cumulative stamp of hundreds of turbines on the views of wide-open farmland and majestic mountains here is an increasingly sticky issue. "How many is too many?" asked Rod Zielinski, a municipal district councilman in Pincher Creek, 250 miles north of Great Falls. Last year, the district unsuccessfully tried to create a wind development-free zone in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. Now it's proposing changes to its bylaws to address "cumulative effect." ...Some residents value tax revenue and jobs more than vistas, and vice versa, Zielinski said. Weighing these equally important but sometimes competing values is the contentious issue in regulating the siting of wind plants, he said. "Be prepared for these things [turbines] to be there forever, like the bank downtown," he said.

It's unlikely a commercial-sized wind farm will be churning in Caledon after council decided to support the requests of several citizens at a council meeting July 8. Town council approved a minimum set-back for windmills from residential dwellings of 500 metres, lower than the 800 metres petitioners were asking for, but higher than Ministry of the Environment (MOE) standards.

Plans to build the largest industrial wind energy project yet proposed for the County was unveiled at a municipal planning committee meeting yesterday. Toronto's Skypower Corporation said they intend to erect 66 wind turbines north of Picton in Hallowell and Sophiasburgh�clustered around the high voltage substation at Elmbrook. Skypower officials said they have accumulated more than 12,000 acres under option with more than 50 farmers and landowners. The proposed Byran Wind Farm stretches from County Road 1 in the south, west to Tripp Road and north to Demorestville. The project will likely use 67 GE's 1.5 MW wind turbines.

Replacing the gearboxes in six faulty wind turbines at East Point in Prince Edward Island is taking longer than expected. The Vestas turbines were shut down in March after problems were discovered in the gearboxes during routine inspection. Three of the 10 turbines on the site are still not operating. The province, which owns the wind farm, expected the work to be completed by the end of June. The turbines are under warrantee, and Vestas is paying for the repairs as well as covering for the power lost during the shutdown.

The first shovels went into the ground on Wolfe Island this week for the start of construction on a $400-million wind power mega-project. Workers are widening some roads and building new ones in the rural community to prepare for the arrival of 86 giant turbines via barge on Lake Ontario, expected to begin as early as next week. The wind farm is expected to be operational by this Christmas or early 2009.

A new group called Innisfil Windwatchers is launching a campaign to stop the construction of a wind turbine farm. The group, made up of businesses and residents near the proposed site on the east side of Hwy. 400 at Concession 5, held a press conference at Avalon Orchards Tuesday morning. ...Chow, who operates a parachute school, said pilots would have to circle around the wind turbines, which would be about 2.8 kilometres from the airfield. “The location of this wind farm couldn’t be worse for us,” he said. “It’s an accident waiting to happen.” Windwatchers reproduced studies done in the United States that quoted residents who complained about health issues associated with living near turbines.

Vistas on the picturesque Tantramar marshes once dotted by marsh barns will soon be home to 43 wind turbines. At an open house held in Sackville on Thursday night, 75 residents and land owners took the opportunity to meet with officials from Acciona Wind Energy Canada Inc. and their partners to learn more about the pending project. ..."What was lacking was an impression of what the facility would look like as a landscape," said John Higham, a resident of Sackville, after the event was over. Higham said he was expecting more information to be available in terms of design and sightlines, explaining he felt like it was an "awkward set-up" and he was disappointed with the way the information was presented.

A small but determined group of Tsawwassen residents continued their fight to prevent high-voltage power line construction Thursday by blocking access to their neighbourhood with parked cars. "The trucks came and tried to get in and we wouldn't move our cars," said resident Tina Ryan, who took part in the morning action on 13A Street. A handful of cars were parked along the narrow roadway, apparently not violating parking laws but making access for large trucks impossible.

Alberta farmers who hope to halt construction of a major power transmission line proposed between Great Falls and Lethbridge were granted permission Thursday to appeal the $150 million project to the Alberta Court of Appeals. "The only way we're ever going to stop this line is to win an appeal and get the decision overturned," said Scott Stenbeck, an attorney representing 16 farmers who live in the Lethbridge and Warner areas. Marc Clark, president of the line's developer, Montana Alberta Tie Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Toronto-based Tonbridge Power Inc., said the ruling may delay the project, but it won't stop the proposed line.

Kourtoff wants to build a 750-megawatt offshore wind farm in these waters, about 15 kilometres off the shore of Prince Edward County. That works out to about 150 wind turbines, seen as specks from the shoreline. And there's potential to double that. Earlier this month, he announced the creation of Tai Wind, a consortium of North American offshore wind developers who hope, by combining their collective needs, to attract a turbine manufacturer to Ontario. Already, Germany's Multibrid is seriously considering the invitation and, sources say, has begun high-level discussions between its executives and Ontario government officials. ..."It should be borne in mind that there is currently no experience in Ontario with offshore wind resources, and it may be that additional information may become available over time that would justify further review of this issue," the power authority concluded in a recent amendment to its 20-year plan. Herein lies a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma. How can the province get a true sense of development costs without forging ahead on at least one project?

Building roads, erecting towers and installing transformer stations and transmission lines destroys forest habitat, and the noise and turbulence and vibrations of spinning turbines may alter the behavioural patterns of wildlife, said Mark Nash, the president of the Canadian Peregrine Foundation, a nongovernmental raptor protection group based in Toronto. ...Nash is particularly concerned about the impacts of developing large wind farms in ecologically sensitive bird migration, staging and nesting areas, like much of Lake Superior's north shore. ..."The jury's still out on the environmental effects of these things," said Nash. "Yet there's a rush for development in some of the most critical raptor habitat in Ontario. Everyone's been sold on this technology and nobody cares about a bunch of birds."

Town council should be cautious in approving locations for wind turbine projects until important natural features have been assessed, says Phil Roberts of the municipal environmental advisory committee. ..."You need to exercise caution," said Roberts. "There's a big learning curve in all of this." He said the county's eco-tourism market -- based largely on the bird and hawk migrations -- has to be kept in mind as wind turbines are sited.

A wind energy project encompassing three municipalities could become a reality if TransCanada Energy's current proposal is successful. The company is suggesting approximately 75 turbines in its Romney Wind Power Project for Chatham-Kent -- between Wheatley and Tilbury -- as well as Leamington and Lakeshore. "The prime interest is the resource potential," said Tom Patterson, the Toronto-based project manager.

After a two-year delay, Toronto Hydro hopes to have a device moored on Lake Ontario this fall to test the breeze for a wind farm 2 kilometres off the Scarborough Bluffs. The goal, says Toronto Hydro chief executive Dave O'Brien, is to establish a 60-turbine offshore wind farm capable of generating 100 megawatts. It should take two years of collecting and analyzing wind-speed data to learn whether the project makes economic sense, O'Brien told councillors is a briefing yesterday. The City of Toronto is the utility's sole shareholder.

Maritime Electric has drawn up a new route for a proposed wind energy transmission line in western P.E.I. Some residents expressed concerns with the original plan put forward in March, saying the transmission line would come too close to many homes. Utility spokeswoman Kim Griffin told CBC News Friday the new 66-kilometre route from Howlan to Sherbrooke, just outside of Summerside, will run more across open space. ..."We wanted people to know that we're listening and that we took a look at [that]. So we'll show them this alternate route and see what they think about it."

A German maker of offshore wind turbines is targeting southern Ontario as the location for its first North American manufacturing plant, a venture that would create thousands of local jobs and inject hundreds of millions of dollars into the province's struggling economy. Multibrid, majority owned by French nuclear giant Areva SA, made the announcement this morning alongside officials from Trillium Power Wind Corp., a local renewable-energy developer that plans to build a massive wind farm in Lake Ontario, about 15 kilometres offshore from Prince Edward County.

In a phone interview from Calgary, Canadian Hydro CEO John Keating said all 88 turbines, towers and their equipment have been in storage. The 66 platforms and access roads for the Melancthon portion of Phase 2 were completed prior to Christmas 2007. He said five of the towers are to be at their sites this week. Movement of those out of storage to the site and their erection on the platforms will proceed in a scheduled and orderly fashion such as to minimize whatever disruptions might occur with the movement of heavy equipment. ...Mr. Keating said none of the work on the 22 Amaranth Township sites has begun because of the wet soil conditions.

Round 2 has begun on attempts to build a new 500,000-volt transmission line between Edmonton and Calgary and it's already looking like the approval process could be as tumultuous as the last one, which ended up being declared a "mistrial." ...So far, after eight hearings, there hasn't exactly been an avalanche of public support for any of the options, according to Dick Way, AESO's senior director of strategic projects. "I can tell you, nobody we've run into yet seems to like any of them," he said. "There's a general desire that, if at all possible, we shouldn't do it. Nobody seems to like these towers. They are not very popular."

On a treeless landscape on the southern tip of Newfoundland's Burin Peninsula, construction crews and heavy-lift equipment have begun growing Newfoundland's first commercial wind farm. Nine Vestas V90 wind turbines that will generate 27 megawatts for the island's power grid were brought in by ship from Europe and trucked to this remote location, which some say might have the best wind in North America. ..."The potential is for hundreds of megawatts, but we are limited to about 80 megawatts from wind generation that we can absorb on the system," said Mr. Jones. "This is an economic limit. More than 80, and we risk having to spill water at our hydro sites."

Producing enough energy for power-hungry Ontario is one challenge the province will face in coming years. Making sure this power actually gets to where it's going is a whole other matter. "You can well imagine that at some point the wires that carry all this electricity are not going to be sufficient," said Tim Taylor, Ontario Power Authority (OPA) spokesman. "There are technical reality constraints."