Six Digby Neck residents will visit Environment Minister Sterling Belliveau Wednesday in Halifax to ask a few questions about a planned wind turbine park. "We're trying to find out his reasoning for approving this turbine site in the first place," Evelyn Hayden said Monday. "We're just a group of concerned citizens that are trying to protect the health of everybody down here."

Prince Edward County councillors and members of the public left the Nov. 10 special meeting over a new proposed windmill bylaw for the municipality at Shire Hall feeling impotent, bemoaning the unanswered questions. "In my opinion, the mark was missed. And in a lot of ways, it feels like we're beating a dead horse because, in the game of politics, the Ontario government trumps municipalities. And if the province doesn't want it, then the province isn't going to care what we have on paper," said Prince Edward County councillor Kevin Gale.

With the very audible rapid whirring of two ceiling fans overhead a constant reminder of the issue, about 500 people jammed into the centre to learn more about proposed industrial wind turbines in the area. Ward 16 Coun. David Marsh told the audience he was holding the town hall meeting as a means to get clarification from the private company Energy Farming Ontario about its intention to build up to 30 of the turbines. He also raised concern that the provincial government's new Green Energy Act ...removes residents' and the city's right to appeal the towers going in to their neighbourhoods.

Just like the July public information session held by Energy Farm Ontario Inc. about its study to develop a wind turbine farm near Grafton, the public meeting held Thursday night by those in opposition, drew a huge gathering of concerned people. It was far beyond standing room only for those squeezed around the edges of the seated audience packed into the Centreton Community Centre. Some were unable to get into the building, forced to stand on the steps and sidewalks outside.

A former tourism official with the provincial government says P.E.I. is not doing enough to protect its scenic vistas. Carol Horne, who now works for the Canadian Tourist Commission, said over the past two decades, only two areas of the island have been designated scenic zones - New London and Borden-Carleton.

Canadian Hydro Developers and hundreds of invited guests celebrated the official opening of the company's 86-turbine wind farm on Wolfe Island yesterday. The emphasis was on "invited." A long line of cars was backed up along the highway leading to the company headquarters as Ontario Provincial Police officers meticulously checked names off a list. Anyone not appearing on the list was asked to pull over and could be turned away.

Question: This week and next, the Bureau des audiences publiques sur l'environnement is holding hearings on two proposed wind projects in central Quebec. Last week, it heard from citizens affected by a 78-turbine wind farm near Thetford Mines. On Wednesday, it will hold hearings in St. Ferdinand on a proposed 50-turbine wind farm. Residents are deeply divided and some have reported acts of vandalism and threats. How concerned are you over how these projects have torn apart communities?

A proposal to put 15 wind turbines as close as one kilometre offshore in Lake Erie should require an environmental assessment, Gord Meuser, a spokesman for the group Citizens Against Lake Erie Wind Turbines, said Friday. SouthPoint Wind has completed its environmental screening report but Meuser said the group will be asking that it be bumped up to an environmental assessment with more studies specifically on Lake Erie.

The province of P.E.I. has confirmed that it will increase the distance wind turbines must be from homes, but not by as much as some were looking for. The setback distance will now be four times the height of the turbine, as measured from the ground to the top of the blade. For the biggest turbines, the V90s, that would mean increasing the setback to 500 metres. Currently it is 375 metres. Noise was the biggest concern.

Bryne Purchase, a former deputy minister of finance and energy in Ontario, now executive director of the Queen's University Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy, says Dalton McGuinty's government seems to be flying by the seat of its pants when it comes to energy. "This has all been driven by relatively simple political thinking: coal bad, wind good," he says. A carbon tax, whatever the form, would have had the advantage of pricing the pollutants out of the market, rather than making wind the default winning technology.

Art installation or environmental protest? No one is sure what the 90 or so plaster hands, each holding a rock, that appeared on a Wolfe Island sideroad this week are meant to symbolize. Nor does anyone know who created them and placed them beside the 2nd Line Road on the west end of the island, but it just so happens that they are situated on a contentious piece of ground.

In Huron County, the local federation of agriculture is calling for a moratorium on projects pending results of an epidemiological study on wind power's health effects. Alternative energy companies, such as the one proposing the Middlesex project, are paying close attention to the rising opposition. "It has kind of taken off across the country."

At the latest public information meeting on July 7, they were saying the same thing, but this time with a brand new plan aimed at being implemented starting August 2009. The plan unveiled to people in St. Joseph called for a decrease in turbine power from 2.4 to 2.3 megawatts, and an increase in numbers, from 120 to 130.

A Kerwood area woman is appealing to other Adelaide-Metcalfe residents to join her in a last minute effort to stop wind turbines from being erected in the township until more information is known about possible negative health effects. "Just stop until we get some studies done," said Esther Wrightman, who recently produced a pamphlet and a website to try to increase awareness of possible health risks.

A group of residents in the countryside west of Port Rowan is looking for help now that the McGuinty government has conceded that wind turbines and people don't mix very well. The McGuinty government proposed last month that new wind turbines in Ontario be at least 550 metres away from the nearest residential dwelling.

Plans to build a wind turbine park for Digby Neck hit a snag this month when Nova Scotia's deputy minister of environment told an executive at Skypower Corp. in a letter that more information about the project is needed before an environmental assessment application is approved. Skypower Corp. of Toronto and Scotian Windfields of Dartmouth have jointly proposed a 30-megawatt wind farm on Digby Neck comprised of 20 wind turbines, each generating 1.5 megawatts of electricity.

Nova Scotia's Deputy Minister of Environment has issued a decision on the Digby Wind Power Project's Environmental Assessment Report that appears to leave the project twisting in the wind. ...In a June 19 letter addressed to SkyPower Corporation VP Charmaine Thompson, Deputy Minister of Environment Nancy Vanstone states quite simply, "I have determined that the registration information provided is insufficient to allow me to make a decision."

At 20.6 metres, the tower, with its distinctive black bands on the three sides facing the water, is the tallest structure along the coast. It is, however, dwarfed by the 80-metre towers in the nearby West Cape wind farm. This wind farm is still growing; some of the towers haven't been completed.

New rules proposed by the Ontario government would forbid the placement of large wind turbines closer than 550 metres to a residence, a distance that could affect the economic viability of many wind projects across the province. The province-wide regulation would create for the first time a minimum setback distance for wind turbines from dwellings, roads, railway lines, wetlands and other environmentally sensitive lands or airspace.

Ontario could become a North American environmental leader, but municipalities can't stand in the way of wind power. That was the message Tuesday from Ontario Energy and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman as he toured a hydroelectric plant here. Smitherman, also Ontario's deputy premier, praised Innergex Renewable Energy Inc. for its operation of the eight-megawatt plant.