Deere & Co., (NYSE: DE) the parent company of John Deere, said last week it would be selling off its energy division.

Deere said it will sell its wind power division, called John Deere Renewables, including all of its farms in eight states, to energy giant Exelon Corp (NYSE: EXC) for $900 million. The deal calls for $860 million now, (more…)

The rapid growth of wind power is offering new challenges for transmission grid operators throughout the world, especially in the U.S. As wind power levels comprise an ever larger portion of utility supply portfolios, rapid changes in the speed and direction of wind resources often cause wind farms to deviate significantly from scheduled deliveries. When this happens, (more…)

With all the hoopla going around for and against wind farms going up all over the US, including here on the Great Lakes and off of Nantucket Sound, I feel it is important to weigh in with a little fact checking on “not-in-my-backyard” (NIMBY) claims. After reading all the comments that are inevitably posted to every article involving the wind industry, I feel it is important to quash all the falsehoods associated with wind power.

I’ll start by saying that I am first and foremost pro-environment before anything else. If “evidence” is ever found during an environmental impact study that a wind farm will harm the local ecosystem, I will be the first in line to oppose it’s construction. Now let’s see some comments from these related links.

First let’s start with the argument that “wind turbines do not produce enough electricity to be a viable investment.” If this was true, then even with government subsidies, wind farm developers would go bankrupt soon. Instead wind farms are a 30 year success story in the US alone. My favorite success story is of farmers in Minnesota and their community owned wind crop.

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Check out these interesting video clips discussing the presence of wind turbines and wind power in American towns.

First up is a clip showing local residents in Cohocton, New York, talking about wind power, and the real benefits they’ve seen from the Cohocton Wind Farm.

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Wind energy has been a fast growing sector of the overall energy market. It is renewable energy that can be produced on an industrial scale that can rival the older established energy sources of coal, gas, oil, hydro, and nuclear.

Now, it accounts for only two percent of the whole energy market, but government officials expect wind to produce one fifth of the total electricity supply in the United States by 2030. Proponents claim wind power can reduce the threat of global warming.

However, a recent study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has found that the opposite is true. Mass produced wind farms can actually affect climate in a negative way. (more…)

China’s surging wind power industry will increasingly move offshore, experts say, as the nation’s first offshore wind farm reaches full power this month and government officials push several additional projects.

The 102-megawatt Shanghai wind farm is the first of several offshore wind projects planned by China, which last month opened bids for three to four large-scale offshore wind farms that officials say could generate 1,000 megawatts of electricity.

Beijing-based energy consultants Azure International predict that by 2020 China will have invested $100 billion to install 30,000 megawatts of capacity off the Chinese coast. (more…)

Wind power generation in Texas is growing so quickly that it is testing the limits of the state’s electrical grid.

The state set a record on March 5 when wind turbines generated 6,272 megawatts of energy, or about 19 percent of the electricity on the state’s main power grid.

That peak far exceeded the 6.2 percent average for wind power in Texas, whose 9,410 megawatts of total wind capacity make it the nation’s wind power leader.

But wind power’s growth poses a critical challenge for the state’s booming wind industry, which includes a 180-megawatt wind farm completed last fall near Corpus Christi in South Texas. (more…)

Living near wind farms does not pose adverse health effects, according to a new study.

The research, conducted by a seven-member panel of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other institutions, was funded by the American and Canadian wind industry associations.

The 85-page report says there is no medical basis for concerns that the audible or “subaudible” sounds of spinning wind turbines cause physiological harm to people who live nearby.

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What would you do if you were worth $3 billion? T. Boone Pickens? Propose to build one of the largest wind farms in Texas, of course!

T. Boone Pickens, American financier and Chairman of BP Capital Management, ironically grew his wealth initially through mergers and acquisitions of oil and gas companies. From there, Pickens expanded his company, Mesa Petroleum, to be one of the largest independent oil companies in the world by 1981.

With his continued success came much criticism. During his peak, Pickens has been accused of being a “corporate raider” – investors who essentially direct or execute a hostile takeover of a company, often with the agenda of breaking up and selling various assets of the company to gain large profits. Though most of his attempts at corporate raiding failed, his endeavors drove the targeted company’s stock up, making Pickens and other investors millions of dollars.

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China will break ground this month on a gigantic, $17 billion wind power farm in the northwestern part of the country that will produce 5 gigawatts of power by next year and 20 gigawatts by 2020, according to the official Xinhua news service. The installation in Gansu Province is known as the “Three Gorges of Wind Power” after the gigantic Three Gorges hydroelectric dam on the Yangtze River. As the Wall Street Journal notes, the Gansu wind power installation is scheduled by 2020 to produce five times the power of T. Boone Pickens’ proposed wind power project on the U.S. Great Plains.

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