Wind farms and solar power plants may offer free fuel costs and no carbon-dioxide emissions, but don't assume there's universal support from environmentalists, according to industry observers. "The world is changing," said Andrew Spielman, a partner at the Denver office of Hogan & Hartson LLC who works on renewable-energy projects. ..."There are more complexities with renewable projects," he said, "and it's no longer an assumption that the environmental community will approve and support renewable projects."

Xcel's voluntary wind power customers in Colorado will be hit with higher bills beginning next year. But regular customers will benefit from lower electric bills, according to Xcel filings with regulators late Tuesday. The utility says fully subscribed customers of WindSource will have to pay higher premiums - about $13 more per month compared with regular customers - because they aren't benefiting from declining natural gas prices enjoyed by regular customers. Fully subscribed customers get all their electricity from wind power. Also, savings from wind power seen in past years, when wind farms were replacing old and costly natural gas-fired power plants, are declining as wind farms are replacing newer and more efficient power plants. ...However, wind industry advocates said the current lower price of coal and natural gas does not reflect their true price. Also, those fuels likely will pay a carbon tax in the near future that would make them a more expensive source of power generation compared to wind, a freely available source.

A major blade manufacturing plant in east Windsor appears to be only a starting point for global wind-power giant Vestas Wind Systems. The company, based out of Denmark, announced Thursday that it now has intentions to build a research and development center in the United States. "Today, Vestas is a technology enterprise. If we want to be market leaders, we have to be present and drive the development, where the market is. And that is, amongst other places, in the U.S.," said Finn Strom Madsen, president of Vestas Technology R&D in a press release. The center is expected to be operating in 2009 and could employ up to 80 people at full capacity in 2010.

Rather than enjoying his role as an REC pioneer, Schendler felt increasingly anxious. In private, he pushed REC brokers for hard evidence that new wind capacity was being built. Their evasiveness gnawed at him. ...The trouble stems from the basic economics of RECs. Credits purchased at $2 a megawatt hour, the price Aspen Skiing and many other corporations pay, logically can't have much effect. Wind developers receive about $51 per megawatt hour for the electricity they sell to utilities. They get another $20 in federal tax breaks, and the equivalent of up to $20 more in accelerated depreciation of their capital equipment. Even many wind-power developers that stand to profit from RECs concede that producers making $91 a megawatt hour aren't going to expand production for another $2. "At this price, they're not very meaningful for the developer," says John Calaway, chief development officer for U.S. wind power at Babcock & Brown ..."It doesn't support building something that wouldn't otherwise be built."

Claiming to be "100 percent wind-powered," as do local companies including Illegal Pete's, La Sportiva and Spyder Active Sports - which all purchased RECs - helps companies promote themselves as green and may make their products more appealing to the increasingly environmentally conscious consumer. But because renewable-energy credits are a relatively cheap and easy way to absolve a company's negative environmental impacts, even when other measures as simple as recycling or energy efficiency may not be used, customers are going to quickly become desensitized to wind-power claims, says Darrin C. Duber-Smith, president of Green Marketing Inc. in Nederland. "We call it 'greenwashing,'" said Duber-Smith, who also teaches classes on sustainability at the Metropolitan State College of Denver and CU. "There's going to be a big backlash to greenwashing coming up real soon. If a company is buying wind credits and then they don't recycle - come on, consumers notice this."

The United States is expected to be home to an anticipated 49,000 MW of installed wind-power capacity by 2015, making it the world's largest wind-power producer, according to a recent report. Developers are expected to invest more than $65 billion between 2007 and 2015 in wind-power facilities, researchers say.

BP’s year-old wind power business plans to launch a host of new projects by year’s end, showing how a major oil company can quickly move into the ranks of major wind companies. Power output from the individual projects, which the company will announce today, tends to be somewhat smaller than typical plants fired by natural gas or coal. But it’s another sign of the growing enthusiasm for renewable power. “This is a profitable business for us today,” said Bob Lukefahr, president of Houston-based BP Alternative Energy North America. “Finding resources and bringing them to market on a large scale is a core function of BP, so over time these will become even bigger projects.”

The report concludes with a dismissive quote from Douglas Lloyd, of Venture Business Research: “There’s too much money chasing too few opportunities. How is it possible that this many solar companies are going to succeed? They’re not.”

Greenblatt noted that while wind power could produce impressive amounts of peak energy during strong gusts, the biggest problem was wind power’s intermittency. The problem could be addressed by a process called compressed air energy storage, where excess energy could be used to pump compressed air into underground storage facilities that could include abandoned mines. When the wind was not blowing, he said, the compressed air could be tapped and combined with the burning of natural gas to create high-efficiency electrical generators approximating the efficiency levels of coal-fueled power plants.

Want wind power? Just walk to the nearest Whole Foods and buy a Wind Power card. Whole Foods, one of the nation’s largest wind power purchasers, will sell wind power cards beginning today. The cards, priced at $5 and $15, will be issued by Renewable Choice Energy, the same Boulder company that sells wind power to Whole Foods. “This represents a brand new step in allowing a point of entry for any residential customer around the country to start getting used to renewable energy,” said Renewable Choice CEO Quayle Hodek. For $15, a customer can buy a wind power card worth 750 kilowatt hours - enough to power an average home for a month. For $5, a customer can buy a card for 250 kilowatt hours.

BEAVER CREEK - While some of the world's leading geologists, physicists and investment bankers are saying a decline in oil production will soon change civilization as we know it, Scott Tinker recently told the Vail Valley there is no energy crisis. "We're never going to run out of oil," said Tinker, Texas' state geologist, as well as the director of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin. "The Stone Age did not end for lack of stones, and the oil age will not end for lack of oil. We'll run out of ideas before we run out of oil." Tinker and 15 others spoke about their views on energy in the region, state and world during Forecast for the Future, an energy forum hosted by the Vail Symposium last weekend at the Vilar Center for the Arts in Beaver Creek.

Quayle Hodek is sitting on a gold mine of green power. He is the keeper of valuable "wind energy credits" for customers who want the electricity powering their homes and businesses to come from wind farms sprinkled across the nation.

there's a missing ingredient that has slowed development of wind power and other renewable energy sources in Colorado and the West: adequate transmission lines. Where the wind tends to blow, there is little population that would be served by wind energy. To move the wind power to populous metro areas requires steep investments by wind-farm developers. High-power lines can cost from $300,000 to $1 million per mile to build.

Western Colorado is poised to make a significant contribution to the nation's energy independence, said Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, who spoke to a capacity crowd at the Energy Forum and Expo Friday in Grand Junction.

In the next two years, a Virginia company hopes to pump upward of $400 million into what could be Colorado's largest wind farm on private grazing land near Grover.

Representative Mark Udall, D-CO, has criticized the mixed signals being generated by Congress on the importance it places on renewable energy research during a debate on the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Act, HR 2419.