Arizona Public Service (APS) has entered into a long-term power purchase agreement with Perrin Ranch Wind LLC, a subsidiary of NextEra Energy Resources, for 100 percent of the energy output from a wind farm located 13 miles north of Williams in Coconino County, Arizona. When completed, the 99-megawatt Perrin Ranch Wind Energy Center will be the largest wind project in the state.

After the Climate Bill Failure – Green Blog – NYTimes.com

With the Senate slinking away from any effort to control climate-altering carbon emissions, the frustrated and perplexed are asking, now what? Can federal and state governments move ahead under existing law to achieve some or all of the greenhouse gas reductions envisioned in the failed legislation?

Just in time comes a report from the respected World Resources Institute attempting to answer just that question. The 60-page paper was released on the very day that the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, pulled the plug on the already-comatose Senate climate bill.

Montana lagging behind in wind power development …Why?

HELENA — When it comes to wind power in Montana, there’s plenty of talk of the coming boom — but as Montana talks, nearby states have sprinted ahead in actual development of wind projects.

Since Democrat Brian Schweitzer became governor in 2005, Montana has gone from virtually no functioning wind farms to a respectable 375 megawatts of wind power produced in the state as of May this year.

Yet during that same time period, Wyoming, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington and Minnesota have each added two, three or four times as much wind power production.

NewNet News – Iberdrola Renovables gets largest ever federal renewable energy grant

The US subsidiary of global renewable power company Iberdrola Renovables has become the recipient of the largest ever US clean energy grant, receiving $170m in stimulus funds for the start-up of the Cayuga Ridge wind farm.

To date, the company has received $867m in incentives from the US Treasury Department as part of the government’s stimulus package for renewable energy to encourage companies to invest in US projects.

With an installed capacity of 300MW, the Cayuga Ridge wind farm is one of the world’s largest wind projects, according to Iberdrola.

The project is located in Illinois south of Chicago between the towns of Odell and Emington, it said.

Disclosure: SDRS represents Iberdrola in a current legal matter.

Sit-in workers open new wind turbine factory – Scotsman.com Business

Workers who took part in an occupation of a wind turbine factory which closed with the loss of hundreds of jobs, are to open their own business making turbines just yards from the site of their former employers on the Isle of Wight, it has been announced.
More than 400 workers lost their jobs when Vestas went out of business a year ago, sparking an 18-day sit-in at the factory in Newport.

Sean McDonagh, who helped organise the protest, has launched a new company, Sureblades, which will start producing wind turbine blades in September, employing a number of ex-Vestas workers. Mr McDonagh, 32, said he hoped to employ more than 40 workers within two years, with the first order going to a wind energy firm in Ireland.

“It has been hard work but I always knew it was the right thing to do because it was crazy to lose jobs in the renewable energy industry,” he told the Press Association.

Cool Synergy: Water Warmed from Cooling New Data Center to Heat Helsinki Homes

A mini revolution in eco-friendly computing is taking place in the depths of the 19th-century Orthodox Uspenski Cathedral in downtown Helsinki, Finland.

The Finnish IT company Academica has installed a new 2MW database server center in an empty second world war bomb shelter meant to protect city officials in the event of a Russian attack. Water warmed while cooling the servers will go on to provide heat for 500 homes or 1,000 flats in a city that often suffers winters of -20C. After the heat is extracted, the water will be recycled back to cool the servers again.

“There have been smaller implementations of similar systems,” says Pietari Päivänen, head of sales at Academica. “Data centers being used to heat parking lots. No one has conducted the heat towards a central heating system however.”