ISHPEMING - Birchview Elementary School may soon become the site for a wind turbine.

The Ishpeming school board voted Monday to begin an assessment of the location by Clean Green Energy, LLC, pending the approval by the district's attorneys.

"The Birchview school's a good area for this because it's quite a windy area," Superintendent Stephen Piereson said.

If it goes forward, the turbine would be the second in the Ishpeming area. Developers of the wind turbine project at Ishpeming's 88-unit Pioneer Bluff Apartments, a senior housing complex, hope to have that structure producing energy this year.

KENTWOOD -- This summer, the process begins to transform manure from 1.3 million turkeys at Sietsema Farms at Howard City into energy to run Sietsema Farm Feeds.

March 04, 2009

Consumers want to buy more of it. States are demanding utilities buy or supply ever-increasing amounts. Policymakers see it as the best hope of reducing carbon emissions. And the power industry is trying to adjust to all of these pressures.

Renewable energy is hot, for all these reasons. While demand for power from all sources increases, overlaid on this issue are more worries about transmission capacity, aging assets and the effect all of this has on reliability.

Reliability drives much of the discussion when utility planners and renewable energy advocates meet to devise a coherent strategy for integrating ever-larger amounts of wind, solar and other energy sources into the transmission grid. Wind, for example, has less than one percent of the electricity production market. But what if it were 20 percent?

February 16, 2009

Hard times are hitting the ethanol sector. But such short term distress will eventually give way to economic prosperity. Industry assets will then operate at capacity and boost ethanol production in the process. That, in turn, will push this country toward energy security while helping to serve the overall environment.

That's the view from one top company official, who adds that the law set in 2007 requiring ethanol production rates to increase from 6 billion gallons a year to 36 billion gallons a year by 2022 is doable. The government has pursued such a policy because it has reasoned that ethanol could alleviate oil supply crunches while diminishing carbon dioxide emissions tied to climate change.

Two alternative energy-related projects were advanced by the Michigan Economic Growth Authority this morning.

A startup company was given a tax abatement for a facility to manufacture towers for wind turbines and a real estate development consulting firm was given an incentive to grow its green consulting practice.

Great Lakes Towers L.L.C. received a 10-year tax abatement for a 100,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Monroe. The company plans to start construction in the spring on the $20 million project, said CFO Ian Charles.