Recently in Renewable power Category

Cape Cod ocean vista lovers have no monopoly on wanting to preserve their views. In the middle of the country, where oceans of prairie are envisioned bearing the weight of a wind-powered future, some people don't think much, either, of turbine-crowned horizons.

The Kansas Supreme Court has now upheld a county government decision banning utility-scale wind farms, which the county commissioners determined "would be incompatible with the rural, agricultural and scenic character" of the place.

If you build it, will they come?

Tres Amigas appears to think so. If the company builds a power hub in Clovis, New Mexico, in a project announced Tuesday, generation and transmission projects would have to be built to hook into it. The three power interconnections would suddenly be Three Friends instead of living mostly parallel lives. An idea exciting enough that it could make an adventurous type want to do it just because it's never been done. Because it's there.

But a lot needs to fall into place if the 22 square miles Tres Amigas has obtained the lease rights for is to be more than a field of dreams.

A sunny, sunny Sunday on the National Mall, and it was just the ticket for the apparently thousands of people lined up to get in the 20 800-square-foot houses erected there to show off what can be done with solar power.

And because just doing it is not enough, we can vote for the one we like best. Old-school, you can vote on paper, right there in one of several tents at the Solar Decathlon, but you can also exercise your American Idol-learned skills and text your vote, one vote per cell phone allowed. It just wouldn't be a bona fide event without a competition.

We've noted before that with wind power, "if it's not one thing, it's another." The newest thing appears in Maine, where wind turbine protesters cite a brand-new medical malady. Maybe big pharma can develop a pill for it someday, but in the meantime ... welcome "turbine anticipation anxiety syndrome."

As a group called All-4-One used to wonder in the 1990s, "Could This Be Magic?"

A federal program intended to give out money, and that actually gives out money. Fast. And there is more where that came from, as much as qualified people ask for.

This is the money that Iberdrola Renewables, Horizon Wind Energy and others are receiving from the departments of Energy and Treasury - a total of about $500 million was just announced this week. Horizon told our colleague Jeff Ryser that it had only filed its actual application last week. And it expected to have the cash deposited in its account - about $50 million - within just a few days.

"[B]rave actions and strong leadership have often succeeded in overcoming seemingly impossible barriers."

Indeed they have.  We must be talking about something deep: conquering disease, rescuing damsels, overthrowing despots. But no; it's "de-carbonizing the power system," and more specifically, getting transmission built to modernize the grid and allow creation of a clean-energy future.

"It's always something," Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say. "If it's not one thing, it's another." Wind power knows something about that.

Now the Associated Press says weatherpersons are raising the latest thing to join the list of hazards and complaints pertaining to wind farms. Birds, bats, sage grouse, horrible hums. It appears now that wind turbine blades can look on Doppler radar like storms or even tornados.

Making wind power work in an integrated power system is a challenge that grows as the amount of wind resources rises. Hardly news, and it's hardly news, either, that natural gas plants are an easy and obvious solution to the intermittency problem that grid operators deal with.

California already has 1,000 MW of wind generation in its system, and more is coming. So the state's independent system operator is wrestling with the best way to deal with it, and with the increasing amount of solar energy expected to come online. Now, the ISO dispatches gas turbines to take up the slack when the wind dies down.

But ISO executive Steve Berberich thinks gas isn't the way to go.

We got the press release the other day about a solar-powered blimp, built in part by French high school students, making the trip across the English Channel. This was just about the time we were observing the 40th anniversary of people walking on the moon, some of us replaying the pinch-me awe that drew indelible tracks in our brain matter.

We weren't quite sure what to think about the blimp -- until colleague Jeff Ryser put one point of view in a nutshell: "We grew up with men walking on the moon. Now our kids are flying blimps across the English Channel." Somehow, he suggested, this wasn't what we had in mind back then.