Into the Wind - the AWEA Blog

The Dec. 20 edition of Midwest Energy News has one of those articles I love: titled "Years later, Wisconsin wind farm fears fail to materialize," it provides an update on Lincoln and Red River townships in Kewaunee County, Wis., where there was a storm of controversy and bitter recrimination in 1998 and 1999 when two utilities announced plans to build wind farms in the area.

The full article is worth a read, as it has some nice local color--a number of industrious Belgian immigrants were among the first Europeans to settle in the area, in the 1850s, and their character helps define it. Today, some residents remain unhappy about the process by which the ...

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Guest article by Justin Wheating, Chief Financial Officer, NRG Systems

I love the holiday season.  Where I grew up in England, Christmas was the major family holiday with a concentration of visits to the pub followed by overeating and naps. The holiday itself was centered on gift giving surprises, food preparation, more imbibing, and attempts to find batteries which were not included with the gifts.

This year for many people the holidays were hard. The news about unemployment and those who are no longer registering for unemployment makes the headlines every week, and uncertainty about the future means that those still employed are cautious about how they spend their money.

Given this, I do not understand why the U.S. ...

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Thanks to the wonder of the modern Internet, old myths about wind power rarely die--they just go on circulating in the anti-windosphere forever.  So as 2011 comes to a close, here is a refresher on some mythbusting facts about wind power:

Wind power is being reliably and cost-effectively integrated with the electric utility system today:
How Wind Energy Is Reliably Integrated on the Grid
Utility Wind Integration State of the Art

Wind power helps save consumers money:
Department of Energy studies show that a Renewable ...

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Comments from AWEA and others on an anti-wind op-ed by Robert Bryce at FoxNews.com disappeared overnight, begging the question: Does Mr. Bryce not want you to see them?  Fortunately, we were able to recover some of them from the Web browser on one of our computers for your reading pleasure.

In the middle of a slow holiday news week, FoxNews.com gave Mr. Bryce, a "senior fellow" at the fossil-fuel-funded Manhattan Institute for Public Policy, space to attack AWEA, its CEO Denise Bode, and some of the companies on its Board of Directors. AWEA ...

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After eight years of research and fundraising, and one final 11th-hour delay caused by a dubious school board member, the "Windplanners," a group of students at Camden Hills Regional High School in Rockport, Me., received the final go-ahead Dec. 6 from the board to install a 100-kW Northern Power Systems wind turbine on school property.

The Windplanners' odyssey began in 2004. After an effort to institute energy efficiency measures at the newly built high school, students decided to work on adding renewable energy to the school's energy supply.  They worked with ...

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The latest attack from the anti-renewable Manhattan Institute’s “senior fellow,” Robert Bryce, omits benefits of renewable energy and oddly suggests not only that big companies shouldn’t be making it – they should pay higher taxes for doing so.

Mr. Bryce got space in a holiday week on FoxNews.com to attack me by name, AWEA, and several of our members – high-profile American energy companies like General Electric, Florida Power & Light’s NextEra Energy, and Iberdrola Renewables Inc. of Portland, Ore. Their crime was to invest tens of billions of dollars in creating a new ...

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This article by Brennan Louw, ClearSky Advisors, was cross-posted from Renewable Energy World.

The health, environmental, and direct job creation benefits of renewable energy vs. traditional forms of power generation are widely accepted. All other things being equal, it would be a foregone conclusion that renewable energy should be chosen over other types of generation. Of course, all other things are not equal. To understand the total impact of integrating renewables into an electricity ...

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The fossil-fuel-funded Globalwarming.org blog has its second post in the past few days attacking wind energy's key incentive, the Production Tax Credit (PTC). The following was posted as a comment:

A more honest view of energy subsidies is provided in a recent report, "What Would Jefferson Do?" from DBL Investors, which found that "current renewable energy subsidies do not constitute an over-subsidized outlier when compared to the historical norm for emerging sources of energy. For example: … the federal commitment to [oil and gas] was five times greater than the federal ...

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The fossil-fuel-funded Heritage Foundation has a new blog post urging that wind power's federal tax incentive be allowed to expire. The following was posted as a comment:

Why is the Heritage Foundation, in these difficult economic times, standing staunchly in support of a job-killing targeted tax increase on an emerging, job-creating industry that is a recognized source of new American manufacturing jobs? Does that square with its other positions on taxes? Keeping taxes low on wind power makes sense: past experience tells us that when taxes are low, development increases; when taxes increase, development drops at least ...

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