Grid operators in the Pacific Northwest have repeatedly pulled the plug on several large wind farms in Oregon and Washington State, collectively curtailing roughly 13 gigawatt hours (GWh) of wind power since last Wednesday.
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Boone Pickens stole the spotlight with his plans to build the world's largest wind farm slightly north of Amarillo in the Texas panhandle, the state's most powerful wind energy resources remain untapped.
And Texas is a state with more wind energy production capacity than any other.
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President Barack Obama has stopped a Chinese company from building wind turbines in the US state of Oregon, citing national security concerns, his administration said.
In 1999 the state's wind power capacity was just 180 megawatts.
Acciona Energia, Clipper Windpower and Siemens USA now operate wind manufacturing facilities in the state, and last month Culver's office announced that TPI Composites will open a plant in Iowa to build turbine blades for GE Energy.
It also can throw a monkey in solar and wind developers efforts to obtain state approvals for their projects and scare off bankers and investors needed to finance what are often multibillion-dollar solar power plants and wind farms.
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The Nature Conservancy is examining potential effects from gas drilling and wind turbines on an eight-state region from New York to Tennessee.
North Carolina boasts more offshore wind power potential than any other state on the East Coast, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
One reason the wind power sector has grown so rapidly in Texas is that the state's oil industry has decades of experience building big projects like wind farms.
He's already shamelessly playing up his support for wind-power subsidies in the Hawkeye State.
WEAs are areas being considered by state-federal government offshore wind task forces and large public-private wind power consortiums like the Atlantic Offshore Wind Energy Consortium.
"The economics are favorable for wind investment given tax credits" and state regulations that require electric companies to boost their use of renewable power, they wrote.
"I just don't see how it doesn't wind up in court, " said state Senate President Steve Sweeney, a Democrat who himself considered a run for U.S. Senate.
Professor SAPOLSKY: And if you are highly accomplished, creative and you've been doing this for a long time, you wind up suffering from this horribly debilitating state, which is you've become eminent.
China's wind generation has increased by more than 100 percent per year since 2005 and 20 per cent of the power supply to the venues of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games will come from wind generators, according to the official state agency, Xinhua.
Or you could wind up in more trouble than your current state of financial confusion.
Wind power accounts for 3% of the state's electricity, compared with 1% nationwide.
He'd know if he came here that 7, 000 jobs have been created here in Iowa by the wind industry -- more than any other state in America.
Residents of the city awakened to crumbling walls, crushed cars, fallen trees and scattered branches after heavy rain, wind and hail hit Wednesday night, the state-run Telam agency said.
Escalating tensions over a proposal to impose rolling outages on wind-power farms in Oregon and Washington State to prevent the electric grid from overheating has convinced the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), which is responsible for operating the power grid in the Pacific Northwest, to pull the plug on the plan.
FORBES: Grid Operators Drop Plan for Rolling Wind-Farm Outages
Three national environmental groups on Friday sued the U.S. Bureau of Land Management over its approval of a planned NextEra Energy Resources wind farm in the Tehachapi region of California that state and federal wildlife officials had warned threatens the critically endangered California condor.
FORBES: Green Groups Sue To Stop California Wind Project That Threatens Condor
There are thousands of Floridians right now who are making a great living promoting solar energy and wind energy and clean energy, all across this state. (Applause.) We doubled our investment in clean energy, which is creating jobs and is good for our environment.
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About 500 megawatts of wind power are on the drawing boards, with the Victorian government aiming to have 10 per cent of the state's electricity, or 1000 megawatts, generated by renewable energy sources such as wind farms by 2006.
By contrast, the North Carolina Offshore Wind Coalition managed to muscle Senate Bill 747 into the state legislature in about three months.
Google said Wednesday that it has signed a first-of-its-kind deal with an Oklahoma utility to buy 48 megawatts of wind energy to help power its data center in that state.
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While equipment like wind turbines and solar panels are typically pricey, federal and state government agencies are offering business owners tax breaks for installing them.
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Then there are the renewable portfolio standards, which mandate that a third of the state's energy come from renewable sources like wind and the sun by 2020.
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Wind is by far the cheapest of the renewable energy technologies, so wind development should grow steadily over the next several years as state renewable power mandates toughen and the federal government contemplates putting a price on carbon.
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