Colorado could soon be home to the world’s largest wind turbine factory. However, officials with the company building the facility is remaining tight-lipped about exactly where in Colorado it would be built.
The Greeley (CO) Tribune reports Denmark-based Vesta Wind Systems won’t say whether it intends to build the plant with its current factory in Windsor:
The near $250 million tower production facility is expected to be fully operation in mid-2010 with an annual processing capacity of 200,000 tons of steel, or 900 towers, and bring 400 new jobs to the state. Vestas also plans to establish a research and development center in the United States in 2009.
Earlier this year, Vestas opened its first American blade manufacturing facility in Windsor’s Great Western Industrial Park. That $65 million, 350,000 square-foot facility, will produce more than 500, 40-meter wind turbines a year when the plant is fully operational, according to company officials.
This is the second big announcement for Vestas since first announcing its intentions to build the blade facility here last year. Originally, the company planned to employ 450 people at full capacity. But an expansion announced late in 2007 added an additional 250 jobs.
Vestas recently opened its first American blade manufacturing facility in North Central Colorado, a $65 million, 350,000 square-foot facility that will crank out more than 500, 120-foot wind turbines annually when it is at full capacity.
You know the old expression: “no good deed goes unpunished.” Well, drivers in California who are trying to do the right thing and run their vehicles on cleaner fuels are getting hit up for not paying taxes… and more.
moves the biodiesel standard up to 5 percent a year from now, 10 percent by 2012, and finally, a whopping 20 percent by 2015. The measure enforces the higher mandate only during the warmer months of the late spring, summer, and early fall months in the northern state:
According to Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the ranking Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, the bill invests $320 million for new loan guarantee program for the development and construction of commercial-scale biorefineries; provides $300 million in the Bioenergy Program to provide assistance to biofuel production plants for the purchase of feedstocks; provides $118 million for biomass research and development efforts; reauthorizes and provides $250 million for grants and loan guarantees for renewable energy and energy efficiency projects; and authorizes a new program, the Biomass Crop Assistance Program to help producers transition to new energy crops for biofuel production.
Higher food prices have led to increasing calls for changes in the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) that was implemented as part the Energy bill just signed into law last December, which calls for 36 billion gallons of annual renewable fuel use by 2022.
The National Biodiesel Board is applauding Congress for coming up with a compromise on the Farm Bill today that contains a provision that renews the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) Bioenergy program.
A company called 
The home-brewed ethanol maker is the brain child of entrepreneur Tom Quinn and ethanol scientist Floyd Butterfield. They unveiled the machine at a press event Thursday in New York. Quinn says the device, which is about the size of a refrigerator, is so simple to use that anyone can do it. “You just open it like a washing machine and dump in your sugar, close the door and push one button,” he says. “A few days later, you’ve got ethanol.”