“South Dakota and Minnesota have robust wind resources to harness, particularly in the area where the power plant was proposed.”
—Lisa Daniels, Windustry

Big Stone II was originally slated to be a cost-effective, clean-coal project to be up and running as early as 2011 near Milbank, South Dakota, supplying new energy for the Midwest and even to Eastern states. Now that the project has been cancelled, many are wondering what went wrong and what will replace the power capacity that it would have supplied to the CapX2020 transmission lines planned for Minnesota.

As the state of Minnesota seeks to generate 25 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2025, communities are finding both that they can be part of that solution and that solution can be part of the future of their community.

One of my pet peeves, as I scan media articles about wind energy, is the number of times when the "community" part of wind energy is either poorly communicated or entirely misunderstood.  So it is refreshing to find good stories in major media outlets which truly represent community wind and I feel like I should pass them along.  That's the case with

"Get small and get in!" is the new message from the federal government, according to Denis Thoet, who manages Long Meadow Farm in West Gardiner, Maine.

While South Dakota currently only has 288 megawatts of wind power capacity installed, the state is experiencing the benefits of the wind industry, explains South Dakota Wind Energy Association Executive Director Steve Wegman in a interview by the National Association of Farm Broadcasting News Service.

Jim Boyd coordinates a wind working group in Grand Marais, Minnesota on the North Shore of Lake Superior. Windustry has been working with the group for over the past year to explore the possibility of a Community Wind project there.

Wind energy use increases most among renewables

In the first four months of 2009, wind energy expanded 34.5 percent compared to the same months of 2008, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration's most recent Monthly Energy Review.

If you think you really know what "smart grid" is all about, raise your hand.  OK, so I can't really tell, but, if you're like me, this is a term that sounds great but has very little real content for you.  Unfortunately, most media coverage uses this term without any definition, as if we all knew what it was and how it works.  So I was pleasantly surprised to read

One of our goals here at Windustry is to link people together across the country who are working in a proactive manner with models of wind energy production that enhance local ownership and are beneficial to rural landowners.