Faced with growing opposition to land-based wind turbines in England, UK officials are looking to build hundreds of wind farms in Ireland that would generate electricity exclusively for the UK.

Government officials say the £8 billion proposal, which includes the construction of more than 700 (more…)

The European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) assessed the offshore wind capacity in Europe over the last six months. They found that at the end of the first half of 2012, the continent’s offshore wind capacity grew by at an astonishing rate from a year ago. A new report by the EWEA shows that there are 132 new offshore wind turbines, providing an additional (more…)

Clearly, wind energy is favored to its fossil fuel counterparts in terms of its environmental footprint. Zero greenhouse gas emissions. Zero global warming potential. Zero heat islands. Simply, wind energy seems to be a perfect part of the solution to a climate change problem.

At least, this is what we thought. (more…)

The operators of large California wind farms are considering the use of advanced radar and telemetry systems to reduce the number of birds killed by spinning turbines located in critical migration pathways.

The so-called avian radar systems, which have been deployed at wind farms in Texas and Europe, would (more…)

A new study has found that wind farms do not have long-term detrimental effects on most bird species, but that populations of some species can decline during site construction.

In a long-term analysis of breeding and population trends for 10 bird species at 18 wind farms across (more…)

Japan’s nuclear disaster last year was more than a large-scale tragedy: it was a wake-up call to the dangers of nuclear power. Germany responded swiftly and decided to pull the plug on its reactors. All over the world a new wave of anti-nuclear sentiment emerged.

Now a consortium of more than ten Japanese (more…)

More than 9,600 megawatts of wind power capacity was installed in European Union member states in 2011, accounting for about 21 percent of all new power capacity installations, according to an industry report.

New offshore wind farms in the UK and land-based projects in Sweden and Germany pushed EU (more…)

What developers and financiers of wind farm projects need to know.

I attended the AWEA Fall Symposium in Carlsbad in November 2011. While it was a good industry gathering, I was intrigued by a panel discussion in which a representative from a major US developer and O&M (operations & maintenance) service provider to wind farms indicated that his (more…)

A recent auction held by the Brazilian National Electric Energy Agency (ANEEL), resulted in 42 new electricity generation projects with a total installed capacity of 1,211.5 megawatts (MW), to meet the projected demand of distribution companies in 2016. Of this total, 39 projects were wind farms, totaling 976.5 MW, or 81 percent of the total power traded in the (more…)

KiteGen thinks that current wind technology only scratches the surface of what’s possible with wind energy. That’s because wind turbines cannot reach higher and touch altitude wind. Rarely wind farms are sited at more than 100m above the ground; the higher they go, the heavier, more unstable and expensive the apparatus becomes. (more…)