Commitments to renewable energy have wobbled a little in the past few years, partly because of the economic climate which has not been favourable to investment and partly because some of the more established technologies have seemed to be less certain, both in terms of performance and in their desirability. For the windpower industry, these have been tricky times. Better established in technology terms than other "naturally-derived" renewable energy sources such as wave and tidal power, wind energy has even so made faltering progress in the UK and elsewhere. Its perennial problems are the intermittency of supply, a difficulty it shares with several other renewables and one which work on energy storage within the grid might be expected to solve in time -and a growing resistance to the siting of wind turbines in both urban and rural settings. What works in the vast emptinesses of Arizona or Australia isn't wanted in the Cotswolds or the leafy suburbs.
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