While the official decision on Cape Wind isn’t expected until noon tomorrow, it’s looking like the nine year struggle over Cape Wind will be settled in favour of the the massive wind farm project’s approval.

The Washington Post has is citing a source close to the Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, as saying that the secretary will approve Cape Wind.

Cape Wind, planned to have 130 wind turbines across 25 square miles of federal ocean space off the coast of Nantucket, will cost approximately $1 billion and be the first American offshore wind power project ever.

This project was recently officially opposed by the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation on the grounds that it was wrecking the view from historical locales like Martha’s Vineyard.

Cape Wind was also strongly supported by six east coast governors who wrote a letter to Salazar last week asking to see the project come to fruition.

The Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) is declaring June 15th as “Global Wind Day” to help promote the growing field of wind energy around the world.

“In the United States, Global Wind Day comes at a time when the nation is surging forward in wind and renewable energy development,” said AWEA CEO Denise Bode,“but we risk losing this momentum and tens of thousands of jobs if Congress does not adopt a strong national renewable energy standard, or RES. America could lose ground to China and Europe where strong renewable energy policy commitments are driving investment in manufacturing and development”

You can check out the GWEC‘s Global Wind Day website and see what events are planned in your area.

At a public hearing in Atlantic City last Monday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar stated that he believed that most, and possibly all, coal power plants in the United States could be replaced by wind turbines along the East Coast.

“The idea that wind energy has the potential to replace most of our coal-burning power today is a very real possibility,” he said. “It is not technology that is pie-in-the sky; it is here and now.”

Salazar estimated that East Coast ocean winds could produce one million megawatts of power, which would account for almost five times the amount of power produced by all coal plants currently operating in the United States.

Not surprisingly, a spokesman for the American Coal Council, Jason Hayes, was more than a little sceptical about this possibility and pointed to roadblocks of wind power including wildlife impact and efficiency issues with transferring power back to shore.

The Atlantic City hearing was the first of four that will be held throughout the US which will examine how energy resources should be utilized with respect to the Obama administration’s energy policy. The Atlantic City Convention Center, where it took place, has the largest roof-mounted solar energy panels in the United States.

The Obama economic stimulus package, which invested so heavily in renewable energy like wind and solar power, is finally having an effect on the green industries.

In a statement to the NY Times the vice-president of Sharp Solar, Ron Kenedi, said that although December, January and February had been “miserable,” things are starting to pick up.

“I call this the green shoots period. We’re seeing new growth,” he said.

Kenedi went to allude to a large-scale, unnamed solar project, which lost its financing late last year. Now, with banks willing to invest “they’ve unstuck their project.”

He also made mention of the stimulus money that will soon be flowing to state governments via conservation-oriented block grants. This should show a marked influence on small-scale solar projects.

However, he added, the industry is still looking for clarity on how a new Treasury grant program (an important stimulus measure for renewable energy that turns tax credits into straight grants) will work. “We are also noting that the financing of projects already slated to go forward is taking extra time to get done,” he said.

Lawyer with Chadbourne & Parke, Keith Martin, stated in an email that a recent call he had conducted with bankers indicated a consensus that the stimulus package is resulting in more activity, if not yet money, in the renewable energy sector.

“There are lots of proposal letters and term sheets circulating,” he said in an e-mail message. “The mood is improving, but it has not translated yet into closing and fresh capital flowing into deals.”

A Clean Edge report released today says that the wind and solar energy industries will be responsible for generating 2.65 million jobs globally in less than a decade. This expected number is about four and half times more than the current number of wind power and solar energy jobs which is approximately 600,000.

This positive predication is tempered by a less sunny short-term outlook, which predicts that renewable energy investments will plateau or even dip this year.

Chaos in the American economy is expected to seriously hamper what would’ve likely been massive, record-setting growth in the wind and solar power industries this year, but hopefully the rosey long-term outlook will keep the renewable energy jobs ball rolling at least somewhat.

Smart-grid technology is taking another step forward as IBM is joining with Danish research consortium EDISON and seeking to optimize wind turbine energy for use with electric cars.

The goal of the project will be to correspond wind turbine energy from the island of Bornholm, Denmark, with the power consumption of electric cars.

The goal of the project is two-fold: increase the number of electric cars in Denmark to 10 percent of the vehicles on the road while shifting an even greater emphasis to wind power in the country.

Denmark already receives 20 percent of its power from renewable energy sources like wind turbines.

IBM’s Global Energy and Utilities is currently involved in approximately 50 different projects like this that relate to smart-grid technology. Allan Schurr, vice president of strategy and development recently explained their emphasis on smart-grid tech saying that it can help utilities better integrate renewable energy sources and run the transmission grid more efficiently.

“Smart-grid technologies are not required to make larger use of wind and solar power but they can make them less expensive,” Schurr said. “Getting a handle on power supply and demand in real time helps address the variable nature of wind and solar power,” he said.

He went on to explain that many forms of renewable energy, particularly wind power, cause problems for power grid operators since power supply is unpredictable. Smart-grid technology can help modulate the loads so that if the wind is blowing, cars should be charging.

The Danish Edison project will try to use simulations and historical data to predict how best to correspond wind turbines power output with the charging of electric car batteries. An example of how this might function would be for a drop in wind speeds to be matched with a slow down in how fast electric car batteries are charged.

Smart grid technology can help balance electricity supply from wind power or solar energy with demand. This would mean eliminating the need for fossil fuel backup generators that are typically used as stand-by power suppliers.

The days of power being generated in centralized locations is coming to an end. The U.S. is coming off a record year in wind power. The UK has an aggressive plan for investing in renewable energy systems and Barack Obama is investing hundreds of billions of dollars to see solar power and wind energy maintain their momentum. It’s safe to say that a wide dispersion of power generation will continue with the proliferation of all these renewable energy forms.

This is creating some problems when it comes to managing power grids since the infrastructure was designed to pipe power from one spot outwards like a spider web.

But wind power and solar energy producing electricity across entire countries grid operators are having problems knowing what generators are connected, whether they are working or not and how much electricity they are generating. This hasn’t been too big a problem so far but with these industries growing like wild fire it likely will be in the near future.

As we reported earlier on our wind power sister site, Southwest Windpower has been lobbying the U.S. government to expand Wi-Fi Internet connections in rural areas so as to allow its wind turbines to communicate with a central operator.

Now FGH research in Germany has taken a look at this same problem and made a significant breakthrough in dealing with this issue.

“Grid management systems were designed around a large number of clients and a few suppliers, but now there are increasing numbers of suppliers. This requires a new level of communication and management system,” explains Bernhard Schowe-von der Brelie, a lead researcher at the FGH research institute.

Schowe-von der Brelie has made great  progress towards developing a solution, for managing distributed resources in an electricity grid while also providing a method of communication between autonomous systems across any network.

The German research has team developed a generic framework that will allow for ‘self-describing’ networks. These networks allow each component, whether it’s a simple wind turbine volt meter or a weather station’s thermometer, to autonomously send its information regarding its function, location and any relevant data.
The results of this “self describing” network is that smart power grids can be set up for a town or city more easily and cost-effectively.

Schowe-von der Brelie explains, “Instead of storing information in a centralized database, the S-TEN approach is for each node, each sensor or device connected to the network, to have its own intelligence.”

A 250 turbine wind farm which is to be built about 10 miles off the shores of Wales has been approved. The ambitious project will begin sending clean electricity to the grid starting in 2012, and will have a peak power production of 750 MW, which is enough to power around 680,000 homes. Apparently, the plans were held up for a while due to concerns among citizens about the “visual impact” of the farm. Fortunately the Department of Energy and Climate Change fast-tracked the project without getting approval from the locals.

This is a common complaint about wind farms, and a preposterous one. I actually love the way those giant space-age wind turbines look, especially the ones they put in the ocean. It looks like the future.

There have been plans to put wind farms off the coast of Cape Cod, and they’ve met with the same ridiculous red-tape entirely based on aesthetics. Nice priorities, a-holes.

Last week the massive discount department store we all know as Wal-Mart made a turn in the right direction for once. Generally Wal-Mart is bashed in the press for their lack of attempting to be a greener company; but last week they were praised for a new deal they announced with Duke Energy.

The deal outlines that a Duke wind farm will provide wind turbine power for 15 percent of all electricity for it’s Texas stores. The farm is in place to become operational in the spring. Wal-Mart is viewing this deal with Duke Power as a long-term investment in wind turbine power and truly believes that this renewable energy can be competitive with traditional energy sources when it comes to costs.

This is really amazing news to see such a massive corporation taking strides to go green. Surely there will be others to follow. Hopefully anyway!

You can see the full press release here.

Canada’s biggest wind farm is situated near Shelburne, Ontario and has a capacity of 199.5 MW. The developer of the project, Canadian Hydro, is expecting the 133-turbine farm to have a yearly output of 545 GWh, which is enough to power 70,000 homes. All of that electricity will be sold to the Ontario Power Authority. This is just one step in Canada’s plan to shut down all coal power plants by 2014 and will be relying on wind and solar power to step in as renewable energy sources.