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ON A ridge near Toledo in Castile-La Mancha stands a row of white windmills. Literary buffs, even if they have never been to Spain, will recognise them as the ferocious giants attacked by Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes's fictional 17th-century hero. These days, however, they are dwarfed by legions of modern wind turbines that grind out not flour but power, helping to make Spain one of the leading producers of wind-based electricity in Europe.

WIND power works, and will work better in the future. But wind is only an interim stop on the way to a world where electricity no longer relies on fossil fuels. The ultimate goal is to harvest the sun's energy directly by intercepting sunlight, rather than by waiting for that sunlight to stir up the atmosphere and sticking turbines in the resulting airstreams.

With wind turbine towers popping up on the U.S. landscape at a rate of almost 10 per day, the need for people to maintain and repair them is reaching the critical point. Community colleges in North Dakota and other states are jumping at the chance to help fill that need and develop a niche for themselves at the same time through wind tech programs.

Texas, headquarters of America's oil industry, is about to stake a fortune on wind power. In what experts say is the biggest investment in the clean and renewable energy in U.S. history, utility officials in the Lone Star State gave preliminary approval Thursday to a $4.9 billion plan to build new transmission lines to carry wind-generated electricity from gusty West Texas to urban areas like Dallas.

Personal wind turbines are more often invented than actually manufactured. Those that make it to the commercial stage are mostly available at several thousands of dollars. That's why it is all the more surprising that as of next September you'll be able to buy a true designer windmill for way less than that.

Wind supplied more of Britain's electricity that water for the first time last year, while power generators preferred gas to coal and nuclear output continued to decline, according to new government data. Five percent of Britain's electricity came from renewable sources in 2007, up from 4.6 percent in 2006, as more wind farms started feeding clean electricity into the network, helping cut the country's carbon emissions.

BPA - Elliot Mainzer takes the key role in developing energy agency policy on climate change, planning and renewables As renewable energy becomes a bigger slice of the Northwest's energy pie, few institutions have as important a role to play as the Bonneville Power Administration, the federal agency that markets electricity generated at 31 dams and a nuclear plant in the region. BPA's regionwide web of transmission lines delivers electrons generated at wind farms east of the Cascades to power-hungry consumers in the Willamette Valley. The agency's flexibility to modulate electricity production at dams on the Columbia allows utilities to safely feed their spiky supply of wind energy onto the grid.

Ethiopia on Thursday signed a 220-million-euro (300 million dollar) deal with a French company for the construction of Africa's largest wind farm. The contract was inked by representatives of the Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation (EEPC) and French wind turbine manufacturer Vergnet.

Wind turbines do not drive birds from surrounding areas, British researchers said on Wednesday, in findings which could make it easier to build more wind farms. Conservation groups have raised fears that large birds could get caught in the turbines and that the structures could disturb other species. But scientists fou

Clean energy company Econcern will partner with China National Offshore Oil Corp and Sinohydro to invest 863 million euros ($1.09 billion) to build four Chinese wind farms, the companies said on Tuesday. Construction of the wind farms, which will generate around 720 megawatts (MW) of renewable energy, will begin in 2009, Netherlands-based Econcern said in a statement.

DOE Report Analyzes U.S. Wind Resources, Technology Requirements, and Manufacturing, Siting and Transmission Hurdles to Increasing the Use of Clean and Sustainable Wind Power

The state began its pursuit of offshore wind generation Tuesday, a move that could lead to building 400-foot-tall turbines off Ocean City. The Maryland Energy Administration asked wind developers to express their interest in building industrial-size windmills a dozen or more miles off the state's 31-mile Atlantic coastline. At the same time, the energy agency said it is launching a study to gauge the economic viability and environmental impact of such a project.

"The Swedish government has announced plans for the construction of 2,000 wind turbines over the next ten years, writes enterprise minister Maud Olofsson in an opinion article in Dagens Nyheter on Tuesday. The goal is to increase electricity production from renewable energy sources by 25 terawatt hours by 2020. This can be compared with a total electricity production from Swedish nuclear power in 2009 of around 50 terawatt hours."

The Guardian has an article on plans to expand micro-hydro generation in Britain - Canals and rivers to lead micro-hydropower revolution Britain's canals and rivers have already been heralded as a low-carbon way to tranport Tesco groceries, a test-bed for hydrogen boats and a opportunity to build more wind turbines. Now they're being billed as a chance for micro hydropower to flourish under new plans unveiled today by British Waterways, which maintains 2,200 miles of the country's canals and rivers. In partnership with The Small Hydro Company, British Waterways said it intended to build 25 small-scale hydro-electric schemes with a capacity of 40MW, enough to power 40,000 homes. While far smaller in capacity than offshore wind farms switched on in 2008, the hydro initiative hopes to raise £120m in private capital over the next three years, create 150 construction jobs and reduce CO2 emissions by 110,000 tonnes annually. Underwater turbines will be installed next to existing weirs and will not affect the navigation of canals and rivers. Larger waterways such as the Trent and Severn rivers will be used for the first hydro power projects, with many of the installations likely to be located in the East Midlands and Yorkshire. It is hoped the first of the 25 hydro installations will be generating renewable electricity by 2010.

The rolling plains of Castilla-La Mancha are dominated by the windmills that provoked the fevered imagination of Don Quixote. But Spain's relentless investment in wind power and other renewable energy sources has proved wrong those who thought it was tilting at windmills. The sleek white wind turbines and hydroelectric plants that have sprung up across the country in recent years generated 30 per cent of Spain's energy this year for the first time.

Here's one for the alternative wind power experiments file - a report from BusinessWeek on an interesting design idea, inspired by the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse of 1940 - Humdinger's Wind Power Alternative. As an MIT engineering undergraduate visiting the rural fishing village of Petite Anse, Haiti, in 2004, Shawn Frayne hoped to devise a way to convert abundant agricultural waste into cheap fuel. But the budding engineer soon found that the community's mainly poor residents faced an altogether more immediate need. Unconnected to the local power grid, they relied heavily on dirty kerosene lamps, which are not only costly to operate but also unhealthy and dangerous. He decided to devise an alternative-a small, safe, and renewable power generator that could be used to power LED lights and small household electronics, such as radios.

Opportunities in the renewable energy technology sector are becoming more diverse as regulatory support extends to technologies other than wind farms, Steve Read, investment manager of the Ventus Funds, said. Read said the Ventus Funds, venture capital trusts operated by Climate Change Capital, are spreading their investments more evenly between wind farm projects and other renewable energy technologies such as land-fill gas and waste biomass.

Wind power truly is a great resource. We should be using lot's more of it. And solar, biomass and geothermal, etc. But, please ask yourself why taxpayers should foot the bill for oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens, so he can connect his intended wind farm to government subsidized transmission line infrastructure? Heck, his financial statement is not bleeding red ink like the U.S. Treasury.

Something that has long been a dream of mine looks like it will be a reality soon. I have always wanted to see a solar powered solar panel factory, or a wind powered wind turbine factory. Basically you use a little fossil fuels to get started, then the first however many turbines/panels off the line power the factory, from then on in it's all carbon neutral.

We know what's really been holding you back from building a wind energy farm in your backyard is the fact that turbines clash with the rest of your décor. Well, Philippe Starck is here to rescue the renewable energy industry with his Democratic Ecology. The transparent mini-turbine, which comes out in September, can generate 20-60 percent of the energy needed to power a home for $633. Pramac, a company better known for oil and diesel generators, helped out with the technical details.