An improving job picture, better housing market and stock market rallies have all led to consumer confidence reaching five-year highs. That has left Americans a bit more likely to reach into their pockets and spend, as monthly revenue reports released by national retailers on Thursday show.

Revenue at stores open at least a year an industry measure of a store's health rose 3.4 percent in May compared with the same month a year ago, according to a preliminary tally of 13 retailers by the International Council of Shopping Centers.

The increase continues a gradual sales uptick that began in early spring. The measure rose 3 percent in April.

"It's good, not great," said Michael Niemira, chief economist at the ICSC. "Some underlying improvement in the U.S. economy along with an improving 'wealth effect' from rising stock and home prices is helping to lift the sales pace,"

He expects the gradual increase to continue, predicting revenue to rise 3 to 3.5 percent in June.

While big chains such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Target Corp and Macy's Inc. don't report monthly revenue, the stores that do offer economists a snapshot of consumer spending habits. In total, the retailers that report monthly data represent about 6 percent of the $2.4 trillion in U.S. retail industry sales.

Accenture managing director Chris Donnelley said the monthly numbers, combined with previous months', are encouraging as weather became more predictable and shoppers acted on pent-up demand for spring and summer clothing.

"Overall, it's a positive sales trend," he said. The numbers were surprisingly consistent across all sectors, he said, including discount stores, specialty apparels and teen stores.

"Everybody seems to produce good numbers, but nobody had a breakthrough for May," he said.

Among the best performers were Costco Wholesale Corp., which reported revenue in stores open at least one year rose 5 percent, though that fell slightly short of analyst expectations of a 5.5 percent rise. The measure rose 6 percent excluding changes in gas prices and the stronger dollar.

Discount department store operator SteinMart had surprisingly strong results, with the measure up 8.2 percent, far above the 2 percent that was expected. Ladies' casual and career sportswear were also among its best categories for the month.

L Brands Inc., which operates Victoria's Secret and Bath and Body Works, and was formerly known as Limited Brands, said the figure rose 3 percent, slightly below analysts' expectations of a 3.2 percent increase.

In the teen sector, the Buckle Inc.'s revenue at stores open at least a year climbed 4.1 percent in May, as teens snapped up spring and summer clothing. Results topped analyst expectations of a 3.3 percent rise.

The reports came as the Labor Department said Thursday that the number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits fell 11,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 346,000, a level consistent with steady job growth. Meanwhile, the stock market has been on a rally, rising every month this year and climbing to record levels this spring, although there has been some pullback in June. And housing prices rose 11 percent in March, the sharpest 12-month increase in 7 years.

But despite the positive news about the economy, analysts expect modest but steady gradual growth rather than any significant spending uptick that may have been seen a decade ago.

"We're not seeing higher gains like we saw in the mid-2000s when the real estate market was on the rise," said Ken Perkins, president of research firm Retail Metrics LLC. "So many consumers still have homes underwater and are still playing catch up."

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Hadfield recently spoke of his Superman-like moments of strength during five months spent on the International Space Station: wielding refrigerators with his fingertips, or somersaulting with a simple tuck and turn.

Coming back to Earth, however, presented operational challenges for the Expedition 35 commander, Hadfield acknowledged in a press conference three days afteraboard a Russian spacecraft touching down in Kazakhstan. []

"Right after I landed, I could feel the weight of my lips and tongue and I had to change how I was talking," Hadfield said in the press conference, which was broadcast on the Canadian Space Agency's website May 16. "I hadn't realized that I learned to talk with a weightless tongue."

Speech is one issue, but other health effects are more pressing for long-term orbiting astronauts. Bone density lessens at a rate of 1 percent a month. Muscle mass shrinks. , with roughly one-fifth of astronauts reporting vision issues.

Until about June 3, Hadfield will do an intensive battery of testing and recovery at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston before pursuing an independent physical rehabilitation program for a few months.

The data gathered during this period is crucial not only to ensure his health, but to add more information ahead of the one-year International Space Station crew missions NASA plans to begin in 2015.

'He's doing basically as expected'

Every day, Hadfield performs a couple of hours of medical tests. Some are scientific, to form part of larger studies about astronaut health. Some are more specific to his condition to ensure he is meeting recovery standards.

Several standard tests take place during the first few weeks of astronauts' return. For example, sometimes they'll stand on a neurodistibular platform that is tilted to test balance. MRIs and optical coherence tomography (infrared images of the retina and optic nerve) are done on their eyes to follow up on ultrasound testing in flight.

During this time Raffi Kuyumjian, the Canadian Space Agency's chief medical officer and Hadfield's personal flight surgeon, has been working closely with the astronaut. Kuyumjian, who normally works at the CSA's headquarters near Montreal, is spending three weeks at Johnson Space Center, where Hadfield is doing his rehabilitation. []

"He's doing basically as expected in the aspects of balance, walking and strength," Kuyumjian told SPACE.com nine days after Hadfield landed. The major focus in the first few days was ensuring Hadfield's balance, blood flow and cardiovascular health, he said.

Notably, Hadfield's first press conference took place as he sat down. That's a custom NASA adopted for all astronauts afterbriefly collapsed while standing during a press conference following shuttle mission STS-115 in 2001, Kuyumjian said. (It was a temporary problem associated with re-adapting to gravity.)

Hadfield had to adapt other Earthly activities to suit his condition, too. His first few showers took place while sitting in the bathtub. Under his clothing, Hadfield briefly sported a G-suit to make sure blood pressure got to his head.

The former flight pilot is also grounded from that most ordinary of human adult acts: driving. Hadfield and all long-duration spaceflight astronauts can't get behind the wheel until 21 days after landing.

Looking ahead to one-year flight

In 2015, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko will . A typical ISS stay is about five to six months.

Only four humans (all Russian) have ever ventured into space for a year or more, withat 437 days. A one-year spaceflight hasn't been attempted since the late 1990s, though, when the Russian Mir space station was still in orbit.

Kuyumjian said there will be changes to health monitoring practices during upcoming year-long spaceflights, but how long it will take Kelly and Kornienko to recover is not well known. Perhaps the effects of microgravity level off after six months spent in space, or perhaps they become more severe, he said.

Previous lengthy flights "were dedicated to the medical aspect," Kuyumjian said, adding that the Russians had no major long-term issues. The challenge on the ISS, however, is astronauts spend hours a day doing experiments outside of medicine, he added.

NASA, the CSA and other agency partners are in continual discussions about how to proceed. More frequent testing of eye pressure in orbit is on the table, and perhaps other accommodations as well.

Kuyumjian further predicted that the scientists and doctors would talk more regularly about their findings.

"There are some questions we need to answer, and for that mission, the collaboration between medical and science will be much closer than it is now," he said. "We will be sharing a lot of data back and forth to answer questions."

Follow Elizabeth Howell , or SPACE.com . We're also onand .

The eight-time Pro Bowler announced his retirement through social media accounts Wednesday. In a statement, he says "after spending a lot of time this spring thinking about my NFL future, I have made a decision to retire."

Urlacher was the face of the Bears' franchise and leaves as one of the game's great linebackers. In March, he and the Bears were unable to reach a contract agreement and he became a free agent.

He started 180 games from 2000 through 2012, and recorded a team-record 1,779 tackles. He has 41 sacks, 22 interceptions, 16 fumble recoveries and 11 forced fumbles. He was the AP's defensive player of the year in 2005 and helped lead the 2006 team to the Super Bowl.

Last year, he was slowed by injuries.

But so far, the companies operating industrial-sized turbines here and elsewhere that are killing eagles and other protected birds have yet to be fined or prosecuted - even though every death is a criminal violation.

The Obama administration has charged oil companies for drowning birds in their waste pits, and power companies for electrocuting birds on power lines.

But the administration has never fined or prosecuted a wind-energy company, even those that flout the law repeatedly.

"What it boils down to is this: If you electrocute an eagle, that is bad, but if you chop it to pieces, that is OK," said Tim Eicher, a former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service enforcement agent based in Cody.

It's a double standard that some Republicans in Congress said Tuesday they would examine after an Associated Press investigation revealed that the Obama administration has shielded the wind power industry from liability and helped keep the scope of the deaths secret.

"We obviously don't want to see indiscriminate killing of birds from any sort of energy production, yet the administration's ridiculous inconsistencies begs questioning and clarity clarity on why wind energy producers are let off the hook," said Sen. David Vitter, R-La.

The House Natural Resources Committee, which was at the beginning stages of an investigation, vowed to dig deeper Tuesday.

"There are serious concerns that the Obama administration is not implementing this law fairly and equally," said Jill Strait, a spokeswoman for the committee's chairman, Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash.

Wind power, a pollution-free energy intended to ease global warming, is a cornerstone of President Barack Obama's energy plan. His administration has championed a $1 billion-a-year tax break to the industry that has nearly doubled the amount of wind power in his first term.

"Climate change is really greatest threat that we see to species conservation in long run," said Fish and Wildlife Service director Dan Ashe in an interview with the AP on Monday. "We have an obligation to support well-designed renewable energy."

But like the oil industry under President George W. Bush, lobbyists and executives have used their favored status to help steer U.S. energy policy.

The result is a green industry that's allowed to do not-so-green things.

More than 573,000 birds are killed by the country's wind farms each year, including 83,000 hunting birds such as hawks, falcons and eagles, according to an estimate published in March in the peer-reviewed Wildlife Society Bulletin.

Getting precise figures is impossible because many companies aren't required to disclose how many birds they kill. And when they do, experts say, the data can be unreliable.

When companies voluntarily report deaths, the Obama administration in many cases refuses to make the information public, saying it belongs to the energy companies or that revealing it would expose trade secrets or implicate ongoing enforcement investigations.

Nearly all the birds being killed are protected under federal environmental laws, which prosecutors have used to generate tens of millions of dollars in fines and settlements from businesses, including oil and gas companies, over the past five years.

"We are all responsible for protecting our wildlife, even the largest of corporations," Colorado U.S. Attorney David M. Gaouette said in 2009 when announcing Exxon Mobil had pleaded guilty and would pay $600,000 for killing 85 birds in five states, including Wyoming.

The large death toll at wind farms shows how the renewable energy rush comes with its own environmental consequences, trade-offs the Obama administration is willing to make in the name of cleaner energy.

"It is the rationale that we have to get off of carbon, we have to get off of fossil fuels, that allows them to justify this," said Tom Dougherty, a long-time environmentalist who worked for nearly 20 years for the National Wildlife Federation in the West, until his retirement in 2008. "But at what cost? In this case, the cost is too high."

The Obama administration has refused to accept that cost when the fossil-fuel industry is to blame. The BP oil company was fined $100 million for killing and harming migratory birds during the 2010 Gulf oil spill. And PacifiCorp, which operates coal plants in Wyoming, paid more than $10.5 million in 2009 for electrocuting 232 eagles along power lines and at its substations.

But PacifiCorp also operates wind farms in the state, where at least 20 eagles have been found dead in recent years, according to corporate surveys submitted to the federal government and obtained by the AP. They've neither been fined nor prosecuted. A spokesman for PacifiCorp, which is a subsidiary of MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co. of Des Moines, Iowa, said that's because its turbines may not be to blame.

By not enforcing the law, the administration provides little incentive for companies to build wind farms where there are fewer birds. And while companies already operating turbines are supposed to avoid killing birds, in reality there's little they can do once the windmills are spinning.

Wind farms are clusters of turbines as tall as 30-story buildings, with spinning rotors as wide as a passenger jet's wingspan. Though the blades appear to move slowly, they can reach speeds up to 170 mph at the tips, creating tornado-like vortexes.

Flying eagles behave like drivers texting on their cellphones; they don't look up. As they scan for food, they don't notice the industrial turbine blades until it's too late.

The rehabilitation coordinator for the Rocky Mountain Raptor Program, Michael Tincher, said he euthanized two golden eagles found starving and near death near wind farms. Both had injuries he'd never seen before: One of their wings appeared to be twisted off.

"There is nothing in the evolution of eagles that would come near to describing a wind turbine. There has never been an opportunity to adapt to that sort of threat," said Grainger Hunt, an eagle expert who researches the U.S. wind-power industry's deadliest location, a northern California area known as Altamont Pass. Wind farms built there decades ago kill more than 60 per year.

Eagle deaths have forced the Obama administration into a difficult choice between its unbridled support for wind energy and enforcing environmental laws that could slow the industry's growth.

Former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, in an interview with the AP before his departure, denied any preferential treatment for wind. Interior Department officials said that criminal prosecution, regardless of the industry, is always a "last resort."

"There's still additional work to be done with eagles and other avian species, but we are working on it very hard," Salazar said. "We will get to the right balance."

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has proposed a rule that would give wind-energy companies potentially decades of shelter from prosecution for killing eagles. The regulation is currently under review at the White House.

The proposal, made at the urging of the wind-energy industry, would allow companies to apply for 30-year permits to kill a set number of bald or golden eagles. Previously, companies were only eligible for five-year permits.

In exchange for the longer timetable, companies agree that if they kill more eagles than allowed, the government could require them to make changes. But the administration recently said it would cap how much a company could be forced to spend on finding ways to reduce the number of eagles its facility is killing.

The Obama administration said the longer permit was needed to "facilitate responsible development of renewable energy" while "continuing to protect eagles."

A similar explanation was given when the Fish and Wildlife Service recently authorized the killing of a single California condor, an endangered species, by a proposed wind farm in California. It also authorized a real estate developer to disturb four birds for its project.

That's because without a long-term authorization to kill eagles, investors are less likely to finance an industry that's violating the law.

Typically, the government would be forced to study the environmental effects of such a regulation before implementing it. In this case, though, the Obama administration avoided a full review, saying the policy was nothing more than an "administrative change."

"It's basically guaranteeing a black box for 30 years, and they're saying 'trust us for oversight.' This is not the path forward," said Katie Umekubo, a renewable energy attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council and a former lawyer for the Fish and Wildlife Service. In private meetings with industry and government leaders in recent months, environmental groups have argued that the 30-year permit needed an in-depth environmental review.

The tactics have created an unexpected rift between the administration and major environmental groups favoring green energy that, until the eagle rule, had often been on the same side as the wind industry.

Those conservation groups that have been critical of the administration's stance from the start, such as the American Bird Conservancy, have often been cut out of the behind-the-scenes discussions and struggled to obtain information on bird deaths at wind farms.

"There are no seats at the exclusive decision-making table for groups that want the wind industry to be held accountable for the birds it kills," said Kelly Fuller, who works on wind issues for the group.

The eagle rule is not the first time the administration has made concessions for the wind-energy industry.

Last year, over objections from some of its own wildlife investigators and biologists, the Interior Department updated its guidelines and provided more cover for wind companies that violate the law.

The administration and some environmentalists say that was the only way to exact some oversight over an industry that operates almost exclusively on private land and generates no pollution, and therefore is exposed to little environmental regulation.

Under both the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, the death of a single bird without a permit is illegal.

But under the Obama administration's new guidelines, wind-energy companies and only wind-energy companies are held to a different standard. Their facilities don't face additional scrutiny until they have a "significant adverse impact" on wildlife or habitat. But under both bird protection laws, any impact has to be addressed.

The rare exception for one industry substantially weakened the government's ability to enforce the law and ignited controversy inside the Interior Department.

"U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service does not do this for the electric utility industry or other industries," Kevin Kritz, a government wildlife biologist in the Rocky Mountain region wrote in government records in September 2011. "Other industries will want to be judged on a similar standard."

Experts working for the agency in California and Nevada wrote in government records in June 2011 that the new federal guidelines should be considered as though they were put together by corporations, since they "accommodate the renewable energy industry's proposals, without due accountability."

The Obama administration, however, repeatedly overruled its experts at the Fish and Wildlife Service. In the end, the wind-energy industry, which was part of the committee that drafted and edited the guidelines, got almost everything it wanted.

"Clearly, there was a bias to wind energy in their favor because they are a renewable source of energy, and justifiably so," said Rob Manes, who runs the Kansas office for The Nature Conservancy and who served on the committee. "We need renewable energy in this country."

The government also declared that senior officials in Washington, many of whom are political appointees, must approve any wind-farm prosecution. Normally, law-enforcement agents in the field have the authority to file charges with federal attorneys.

While all big cases are typically cleared through headquarters, such a blanket policy has never been applied to an entire industry, former officials said.

"It's over," Eicher said. "You'll never see a prosecution now."

Not so, says the Fish and Wildlife Service. It said it is investigating 18 bird-death cases involving wind-power facilities, and seven have been referred to the Justice Department. A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to discuss the status of those cases.

Ashe said his agency always made it clear to wind companies that if they kill birds they could still be liable.

"We are not allowing them to do it. They do it," he said of the bird deaths. "And we will successfully prosecute wind companies if they are in significant noncompliance."

But officials acknowledge that their priority is cooperating with companies before wind farms are built to encourage them to be put where they won't harm birds. Once they are built, there is little companies can do except shut down turbines or remove them and that means reducing the amount of electricity they generate and violating deals struck with companies purchasing their electricity.

By contrast, there are easy fixes for oil companies and companies operating power lines to stop killing birds. The government often requests companies take such steps before it decides to prosecute.

"We just can't be bringing a criminal case against a company that is up and running if there is not a solution," said Jill Birchell, head of the Fish and Wildlife Service law enforcement office in California and Nevada. "We can fine them, but that doesn't help eagles."

In the meantime, birds continue to die. The golden eagle population in the West, prior to the wind energy boom, was declining so much that the government's conservation goal in 2009 was not to allow the eagle population to decrease by a single bird.

The reason boils down to biology. Eagles take five years to reach the age when they can reproduce, and often they only produce one chick a year.

In its defense, the wind-energy industry points out that more eagles are killed each year by cars, electrocutions and poisoning than by turbines.

Ashe noted that the government doesn't require other industrial facilities to disclose the numbers of birds they kill.

Documents and emails obtained by the AP offer glimpses of the problem: 14 deaths at seven facilities in California, five each in New Mexico and Oregon, one in Washington state and another in Nevada, where an eagle was found with a hole in its neck, exposing the bone.

Unlike the estimates, these are hard numbers, proof of deaths, the beginnings of a mosaic revealing the problem.

One of the deadliest places in the country for golden eagles is Wyoming, where federal officials said wind farms have killed more than 50 golden eagles since 2009, predominantly in the southeastern part of the state. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the figures.

At a different facility, Duke Energy's Top of the World wind farm, a 17,000-acre site with 110 turbines located about 35 miles east of Casper, 10 eagles have been killed in the first two years of operation. It is the deadliest of Duke's 15 wind power plants for eagles.

The company's environmental director for renewable energy, Tim Hayes, said Duke is doing all it can, not only because it wants to fix the problem but because it could reduce the company's liability. Two of the company's wind farms in Wyoming Top of the World and Campbell Hill are under investigation by the federal government for the deaths of golden eagles and other birds, according to a report the company filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week. The report was filed after the AP visited a Duke facility in Wyoming and asked senior executives about the deaths.

Duke encourages workers to drive slower so as not to scare eagles from their roosts. They remove dead animals that eagles eat. And they've removed rock piles where the bird's prey lives. They also keep internal data on every dead bird in order to determine whether these efforts are working. The company is also testing radar technology to detect eagles and is considering blaring loud noises to prevent the birds from flying into danger.

The only other option is shutting off the turbines when eagles approach. And even that method hasn't been scientifically proven to work.

At Top of the World, Duke shut down 13 turbines for a week in March, often the deadliest time for eagles. The experiment, the company says, paid off. Not a single eagle was killed that month.

Hayes says the company has repeatedly sought a permit from the federal government to kill eagles legally, but was told it was killing too many to qualify.

When an eagle is killed, Duke employees are also prohibited by law from removing the carcass.

Each death is a tiny crime scene. So workers walk out underneath the spinning rotors and cover the dead bird with a tarp. It lies there, protected from scavengers but decaying underneath its shroud, until someone from the government comes to get it.

___

Follow Dina Cappiello at http://www.twitter.com/dinacappiello

Contact the Washington investigative team at DCinvestigations(at)ap.org

No decision has been made regarding dates of the NFL Draft in 2015 and beyond, the NFL said in a statement on Tuesday.

Teams were told that a variety of alternatives were being explored for future drafts, including continuing at Radio City, moving to another New York location or other cities.

The change in the date of the 2014 Draft will not impact any other parts of the offseason schedule for teams, the NFL said.

(Reporting by Larry Fine in New York; Editing by Frank Pingue)

On Jan. 12, a series of opinion pieces penned by Fantino appeared on the Canadian International Development Agency website. Two of them included political content, with the titles "Dear NDP: CIDA does not need your economic advice," and "Liberals make promises, Conservatives get results."

A few days later, when media and the opposition began to question the propriety of putting partisan material on a federal government website, the letters were quickly taken down.

Fantino's spokespeople blamed bureaucrats at the time, suggesting they posted the partisan letters by mistake after being asked to put some of his opinion pieces online.

"CIDA was asked to add appropriate web content and these were posted in error. CIDA has been asked to remove them immediately," Meagan Murdoch said on Jan. 15.

But emails released to The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act show that Jo-Ann Purcell, a CIDA employee who worked directly inside Fantino's office, was in the loop on the web content. Purcell acted as the main liaison between the department and the minister.

"Can you let me know what format/section of CIDA's website these will be posted on? If possible, can you send a mock-up before posting all of them?" Purcell, then the senior departmental assistant in the minister's office, asked in a Jan. 3 email with the subject line "Ministerial editorials."

Part of Purcell's email was withheld under the Access to Information Act because it apparently contained advice, recommendations, consultations and/or deliberations with officials or the minister. An email that followed directly afterward was also withheld for the same reasons.

Few additional details were forthcoming Wednesday from the minister's office.

"CIDA was asked to add appropriate web content," Murdoch said in an emailed statement that echoed her Jan. 15 reaction. "Two items were posted by officials in error. CIDA was asked to remove them immediately and they did."

In the documents, bureaucrats told Purcell that the nine selected articles would have to go through a translation process. The minister's office was then asked which order to put the articles in: "Would OMINE (the minister's office) have a preference?"

On the day they went online, Jan. 12, Purcell wrote to the president of CIDA and other senior officials telling them "all" the material had been posted.

"OMINE (minister's office) aware," Purcell wrote, pasting links to the website.

Three days later, when media began questioning the letters on Twitter and calling CIDA, Purcell told confused bureaucrats to remove all the content from the web.

Officials from the Treasury Board Secretariat, which oversees the rules on non-partisan communications in the government, immediately got involved. Bureaucrats from the Privy Council Office the prime minister's department had their hands in the communications response to media outlets.

And there seemed to be some concern from the Privy Council Office about just how much the minister's office knew.

"We also need the email that was sent to the minister's office advising them of this posting on Saturday," wrote one PCO official.

A copy of Purcell's redacted email of Jan. 3 was forwarded to the Privy Council in response.

The court voted 6-3 Monday to uphold an appeals court ruling in favor the Federal Communications Commission.

The case involves complaints to the FCC by telecommunications companies and the wireless industry that local authorities are delaying the placement and construction of wireless service facilities. The FCC said that local jurisdictions generally should act on applications within three months for existing structures and five months for new towers.

Several cities challenged the FCC's authority.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the court, rejected the cities' claims.

Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy, dissented.

BUNGENDORE, Australia (Reuters) - On a line of low hills standing sentinel beside a dry lake bed near Australia's capital, giant turbines turning slowly in a chill winter breeze give no hint of a multi-billion-dollar storm building around renewable energy.

Infigen Energy's Capital Windfarm, built five years ago, was a vanguard for wind power as Australia sought to wean itself from cheap fossil-fuel power in the face of climate shift blamed in part for Lake George's transformation to a vast plain.

But big plans to expand the Infigen renewable energy project near Canberra and others like it have been put on hold awaiting the outcome of an election in September.

The ballot, which opinion polls show the opposition conservatives winning, along with an economic slowdown and rising home energy bills have put the brakes on Australia's decade-long clean energy push.

At stake in the September 14 vote is a controversial carbon trading scheme championed by ruling Labor to curb greenhouse gas emissions, with a $20 billion pipeline in renewable investment largely on hold as nervous companies sit on their hands.

Infigen for one has not decided whether to go ahead with a A$180 million expansion of the Capital wind farm, despite having local planning approval, or with a A$150 million joint venture solar plant with U.S.-based Suntech Power.

"We expect changes. We don't know what they'll be. But the uncertainty is having a crippling effect on the market," says Nathan Fabian, head of a group of institutional investors with $900 billion in funds under management and worried about the looming climate fight.

The conservative coalition has pledged "in blood" to scrap a carbon tax and cut power costs in a country with plentiful supplies of cheap coal, while reviewing policy on renewable power.

But how they may do it is unclear.

"We don't see any clear long-term policy direction on the climate or energy sector from the opposition," says Fabian, of Australia's Investor Group on Climate Change, which includes pension funds and major international banks. "And until that is clear, capital is sitting on the sidelines."

WORLD FIRST

Reversing renewable momentum would be politically risky for opposition leader Tony Abbott, not only because of electoral concern about climate shift and the billions of dollars at stake, but also because the push to cleaner energy was born in conservative politics.

In 2001, with scientific warnings of global warming and growing public pressure for action after a decade-long drought, the former conservative government put in place a world-first mandatory target for renewable energy.

That grew with Labor's election in 2007, and laws were passed requiring 20 percent of power to come from renewable generation by 2020 under a fixed Renewable Energy Target (RET) of 41,000 gigawatt hours from solar, geothermal and wind.

Backed by tradable certificates to make renewable power more competitive against coal generators, the RET was to drive clean investment while scrubbing 41 million tonnes of greenhouse gas each year from national emissions.

Wind energy's share of total generation is projected to shoot up from 1.5 percent in 2007 to 12 percent in 2029, growing by nearly 70 percent annually along a breeze corridor wider than Western Europe blowing across Australia's southern latitudes.

But big power generators and utilities like Origin Energy and EnergyAustralia, as well as gas producer Santos, are now pushing for the RET to be wound back or scrapped, along with the carbon price.

Origin's CEO Grant King says renewable power is more expensive and intermittent than gas and coal-fired generation.

Large energy companies also argue the renewable target will overshoot its aim, as electricity sector emissions are at a 10-year low due to the carbon price, falling demand and a manufacturing slowdown as a China-led resource boom retreats.

That argument has sympathy even among senior government lawmakers like Martin Ferguson, Labor's Energy Minister until March when he resigned.

"The RET is not 20 percent and nor is it 25 percent as some in government will admit. I think due to the real reduction in demand for energy, reflected in the work of the energy market operator, it is more like 30-33 percent," Ferguson said.

Large industry players are pushing opposition climate change spokesman Greg Hunt to consider a target of around 27,000 gigawatt hours instead of 41,000, which would drastically change the viability of some renewable projects in the pipeline.

CONSERVATIVES VOW CHANGES

While Hunt has said he is "very much aware of the importance of providing certainty for the renewable energy sector" and that changes will "create sovereign risk", he has promised to review the scheme next year.

Lawmakers on both sides of the political divide say a conservative government will have no choice but to bring in changes.

"Why saddle industry which is struggling? Industry is saying take the pressure off," says a senior Canberra lawmaker who asked not to be named because of political sensitivities.

Last week, Hunt warned a conservative government planned changes to grants for renewable projects and that it would look to back out of contracts signed pre-election by the government's A$10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation, set up to help commercialize wind and solar ventures.

Adding to political paralysis, banks are also unwilling to loan money for new renewable projects not underpinned by industry-standard power purchase agreements signed with energy retailers - often the same power utilities opposed to the current renewable target.

Pacific Hydro's Australian general manager Lane Crockett says the political uncertainty around the RET has stalled plans to expand. "I'm sentiment unsure. I've never seen the crystal ball more hazy," he says.

After a decade of building, only two wind projects are going ahead at the moment: Meridian Energy's Mt Mercer wind farm in Victoria state and TrustPower's Snowtown 2 wind farm in South Australia.

Meridian's project is one of a few going ahead without an underpinning sale agreement. The company will not comment on its reasons, but rivals say the decision to go ahead points to an "unusually bullish board".

Infigen Energy Managing Director Miles George says bigger energy companies arguing against the 41,000 Gwh target are motivated by self interest, with Origin looking to protect multi-billion dollar gas investments.

Infigen, which has six wind farms in three Australian states and another 13 largely on hold, says experience in the South Australia state shows wind generation is starting to depress wholesale electricity market prices.

Wind now accounts for 21 percent of installed capacity in the state against 13 percent for coal and 47 percent for natural gas, and supplies over 25 percent of electricity.

"There's no fuel cost, so they can actually come in cheaper than coal. And now they are becoming large enough that they are actually becoming a threat," says Brett Harper, of carbon and energy research firm RepuTex.

(Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

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