Wind power is winning in the Northeast Kingdom, and will continue to win, for a couple of reasons.

Energy policy is terribly sensitive to fashion, and wind is currently fashionable.

Hydro power used to be fashionable, and therefore good, and easy to push through the permit process. Now it is unfashionable, so while Vermont consumes great quantities of power from Hydro Quebec, we can't count it as renewable energy in our utilities' portfolios. That, of course, is an act of deliberate, politically inspired stupidity.

And small-scale hydro projects struggle to get through a regulatory process so long and labyrinthine that, by the time they get to the other side, they've cost too much to be worth bothering with.

But wind is the source of the day, and those who oppose it are selfish souls who put something as trivial as a view ahead of problems as big as global warming.

That might make sense if we didn't live in a state that, decades ago, came to a remarkable consensus that our views, and particularly our ridge lines, should be protected from development.

Another reason wind is winning is that we all draw our "do not cross" lines in different places. In a group as small as the people who write this newspaper, we have one person who thinks the old radar station on East Mountain is the worst place to put a wind farm, and others who would be fine with that.

We have one person who might leave the state if wind towers appear on Lowell Mountain, and others who would be okay with that.

The people of Sheffield welcomed wind because they'll get a lot of tax relief from something they pretty much won't see, while the people who will have to look at it are talking about wind power as a cancer that is infecting their environment.

The same pattern is developing in Lowell, which stands to become the next tax-free town, while people in Albany are dealing with anger and disbelief that their neighbors could do anything quite so stupid.

We think it's time to broaden the terms of the debate. It's time to stop letting the wind developers pick us apart, town by town. It's time to think hard about whether this state, which can only use wind to generate power by despoiling its ridge lines, is really a sensible place to put wind farms.

We're making power from trash in Coventry. We're also making power from cow poop in Coventry, and that's a promising technology that works well with what we already have - and need to preserve - in this corner of Vermont. Weneed to make more power from the sun, and from the wood we have in such abundance.

But it's time to say no to industrial-scale wind farms on our ridge lines. And if that sends the developers to other states, it's time to let them go.