Excuse the long title, but I think it shows just how global the alternative energy industry is becoming.

The world's leading Wind turbine manufacturer, Vestas, a Danish company, has just sold 40 MW of wind turbines (worth approx $45m) to Renewable Energy Generation - a British company for a windfarm in Canada.

Obviously, in the grand scheme of things, for Vestas - a huge company, this is not a big deal, just a small one. But for REG, their global portfolio spread between Poland, Canada and the UK makes a lot of sense. Canada, I've long regarded as a great place to site wind, because hardly anyone lives there- so little popular opposition, there are voluminous high windspeed sites and if sited near to one of their ubiquitous hydropower plants, the installed cost per megawatt can be substantially reduced. Poland is an emerging wind market and the UK, if the planning could be sorted out (not very likely, very soon) could be huge.

REG's strategy reflects the trend of windfarm developers to diversify internationally to hedge risks against annual low windspeeds in any given country.

Expect to see plenty more of this.

Repower Systems AG has just been upgraded to a buy by Deutsche Bank. This is because they anticipate a margin recovery to approximately 3% this year and to 5%-6% in 2007 and approximately 8% in 2008.

Excuse me if I don't think that's particularly impressive - not least in a booming industry. Nevertheless, the growth continues to be impressive, if not hugely profitable. And they are going to be the first wind company to mass produce the world's biggest turbine - a 5 MW model.

If you think that stage 2 of Europe's wind power development is going offshore, then large wind turbines made by Repower are going to have an outsize role. That's because offshore farms are very expensive to set up (say $2m an installed megawatt v. $1.3m for an onshore installed megawatt) but the larger turbine size makes it easier to recoup that investment.

In other words . . .

The bigger the turbine, the lower the maintenance costs per installed MW, the higher the ouput, the faster the payback.

There was a school of thought - which yours truly subscribed to - that believed large wind turbines could not be exported. They were simply too large, heavy and cumbersome to merit journeys over long distances. So manufacturing ideally took place as near to the actual windfarm as possible.

Suzlon has very clearly bucked this concept. Over the next 6 months, they will be importing turbines and machinery via the port of Baltimore including blades and generators made in India.

But it's not all one way - Suzlon's US subsidiary recently started producing blades and nose cones, creating up to 275 jobs.

America's Production Tax Credit - equal to about 1.8 cents per kilowatt hour - stands out in the renewable subsidy world because it is so short term. Each year, it goes through an annual renewal vote by the US Congress - typically after the 12 month period has expired. As such it is a very difficult calculation to make for investors with no long term pricing support. It expires at the end of this year.

So news that Gamesa Energy USA, a subsidiary of Gamesa Corp - a big player in the wind world - has sold the rights to its Allegheny Ridge wind farm to an Australian firm, Babcock & Brown deserves attention. Clearly a company who accounts in Euros may not be too thrilled to have dollar assets over the next year or so. The dollar does seem set to go south. But it is also symptomatic of something much bigger.

Earlier this week, Goldman Sachs announced that it was putting up for sale Horizon Wind Energy. Many view this as Goldman (and they won't comment) predicting the top of the market and some concern that the PTC will not renewed.

As a rule, I'm against subsidies. But if you're going to have them in place to achieve long-term changes, then they themselves have to be long-term. 1 year just isn't enough for an investment in wind turbines which when installed, may take 10 years to pay for themselves. Viewed from afar, the state programmes of Renewables Portfolio Standards appear to be far more effective than the federal PTC.