What the department’s new approach fails to recognize is that UPC’s wind towers — at 420 feet tall on top of ridgelines in Sheffield — will be the most prominent feature on the ridgelines for miles around for residents and visitors of numerous locations, not just Sheffield and Sutton. The compromise might show respect for the decision-making process, but it fails to respect the real impact of these industrial giants on Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. We need leadership and clarity on this divisive issue. Before we’re at the stage where wind companies are seeking approval from the Public Service Board to build their individual projects, the state needs an overall energy plan, a vision. The state should follow up on its promise of a public engagement process on energy to educate and inform Vermonters about energy choices and tradeoffs.

Thus, despite the millions being spent with huge subsidies from the pockets of ourselves, the taxpayers, clearly England and Wales are not windy enough to allow large turbines to work at the rates claimed for them. The report concludes that, if wind turbines are to make a meaningful contribution to renewable energy, then the most effective place to site them is at sea near major cities where they can harness the greater power of offshore winds without losing much of the electricity generated in long distance transmission through to the National Grid.

Although the approach is too late for projects that have already begun a federal review process, a dozen New England congressmen and senators have asked for help from the Department of Energy in coordinating a regional approach to siting liquefied natural gas facilities. Reps. Tom Allen and Mike Michaud have both signed on to this request, which makes sense for future energy projects.

The “turbine syndrome” - characterised by complete indifference to public opinion - has spread its tentacles throughout the whole of the Scottish community and we need, urgently, to deny it further progress. If we fail to remove from office these modern barbarians, we will suffer the ignominy of becoming mere ciphers in a submissive, uncontesting, unresponsive society with all that that entails.

Renewable energy sources are a great hope for the future. But there is a time and place for everything. The time for the construction of wind power facilities is after environmental impact studies. The place is anywhere away from people and off of ridge-tops.

If climate change is the Big One, let's start with energy policy. We must do more to support renewable energy, and Scotland is well placed to lead the way, for example, with marine technologies. But the newly elected Executive must also make sure that renewable energy developments avoid the most sensitive locations, such as the Lewis peatlands, whose future is threatened by a huge wind farm right in the middle of an area safeguarded under European law for its wildlife. Renewable developments that cause irreparable damage to such precious places make no sense. We can make the shift to greener energy, and create jobs, without sacrificing such places.

With wind farm development continuing to become somewhat of a household word along the eastern ridges of West Virginia, it’s imperative for Gov. Joe Manchin’s newly established Public Energy Authority to become familiar with the issues as quickly as possible.

To some, my vote against wind power in Malone was a vote against progress; however, be assured that this decision was based on hundreds of hours of study and research, as well as numerous mathematical calculations backed by years of business experience and a graduate degree in physics. This vote was against the degradation of local property values, destruction of some wonderful viewsheds, lowering the quality of life of some local residents, and the accruing of millions of dollars of NY taxpayer dollars by a few wind developers.

The debate state residents and lawmakers should be having about how best to harness our untapped wealth of wind power has been reduced to an emotion-packed battle between local control and state mandates.

IT is time for UK governments to take a serious look at how we manage the seas. The current position is shambolic.......The sea is particularly important to Wales because she has a disproportionately long and beautiful coastline and also has a disproportionately high dependency on the tourism industry.

It’s simply not in the best interest of the industry, the public and the environment to place massive windmills across the commonwealth without ground rules about where they can be appropriately built with the least amount of negative impact.

Massachusetts has an ambitious goal for renewable-energy development but no realistic plan or guidelines to reach it. The result is a free-for-all with the state lavishing money on wind-power development in the Berkshires, investors and other states benefiting from the largess, and Berkshire towns and residents left in the dark as to the real consequences for our community, our economy, and our beautiful mountains.
Editor's Note: Eleanor Tillinghast is head of Green Berkshires, Inc., an environmental group based in western Massachusetts.

The bill would basically tell people, especially those who in the past objected to the siting of natural gas transmission lines and windmills, to go fly a kite.

I have been an unabashed critic of large scale industrial development for Cherry Valley from the very beginning. The experience of working on two very sophisticated planning documents made me believe that the large footprint turbines bring to the town will do irreversible damage to Cherry Valley’s future.

We hope other Virginia localities watching these proceedings will profit from learning that currently unreliable wind power is green only for those who are allowed to siphon off government money at taxpayers’ expense and that as this high-cost energy is fed back into the grid, it will result in higher, not lower, electric bills for users. And we hope the cumulative anguish of Highlanders expressed during the hearings will give other decision-makers pause when they consider the real costs of wrongly-sited wind power.

The legislature needs to be involved in the RPS process. It is a crime to raise hundreds of millions of dollars and then fritter it away on projects that in the end will not reduce emissions.

These examples show that offshore wind technology is advancing so rapidly that sacrificing Nantucket Sound for a project like the one currently being proposed is shortsighted. In the near future, the public could get the same benefits from building an offshore wind plant farther out to sea with far fewer negative impacts, and at the same time avoid being saddled with what may well become an obsolete technology.

"..I urge MMS to wait until it establishes guidelines to all offshore wind projects before it acts upon an individual project, such as Cape Wind. In my opinion, the review of this project at this time would make little sense and would undermine the goal of developing comprehensive guidelines that establish the specific criteria for reviewing such projects, including those that specifically protect the interests of any state affected by the project.

"It's important that people realize the scope of them, the number and the size," (Gov.) Douglas said. "We need to slow down. This is a very important decision."

A Massachusetts wind developer has met his match in the Northeast Kingdom, where people are rallying against his plan to industrialize their ridgeline with massive turbines.