The tower you see in the picture is a bog standard Spanish electricity pylon. Very ugly and the laws here in Spain allow service providers to install infrastructure on your land (including bus stops!!! I have one of these and an electricity pylon outside my bar and they won't move either).

Here in Spain I am continually surprised by the lack of RE projects for domestic use (and peoples awareness of it), we do have some large wind farms dotted around the country as well as some now very large commercial solar farms. During the summer months of July/August/September we get up to 18 hours of sunshine a day and this with something like 320 days of sunshine a year here on the Costa Blanca makes for perfect solar usage.

We now have a law in Spain that states that every new build must have at least 1 sqm of solar panel installed (not much but a start). This usually is in the form of solar water heating (as in the panel you can see to the top right of the picture on your blog) and rather less usage of solar electricity.

I am new here and new to DIY Solar and Wind power but have been reading veraciously the content on this site and on the Home Grown Power site for several weeks. Right now I am thinking of designing my first wind turbine and have decided I am going to build myself a VAWT (of which particular flavor I have not yet decided but like the look of a couple of designs I have seen here and else where). People say "why not go solar" and I will. But for the pure fun of building a mill from scratch well..... solar panel installation just can't compete.

I look forward to discussing some of my ideas over the coming months with you all and as I progress with my project I will try to keep anybody who may be interested updated.