Rural communities around the world are recognizing the benefits of generating electricity locally. Even big cities are getting into the act.

An article in The Times on Wednesday centers on Tocco da Casauria, a small, traditional town in Italy whose four wind turbines, installed over the past four years, produce 30 percent more energy than its residents use. In fact, money made from the production of clean energy has brought the town back from the brink of insolvency and allowed to renovate its school and perform other much-needed municipal repairs…
In fact, many of the recent renewable plants in Italy are small in scale — a turbine or two in a village — not those immense wind parks that dominate a landscape. That is partly the because the permitting process for large-scale installation is so complicated in Italy.

New York City is experimenting with rooftop wind turbines and PSU has conducted an array of tests to determine wind patters on office buildings in downtown Portland.

Yet Coos Bay City Council ban wind.