COMES the hour, comes the man. Dale Hart has spent about thirty years building up to the stage where he could run his own renewable energy business and the goal is almost within his reach. Almost, but not quite.

His plan to bring two-dozen 1.3 megawatt windmills to a flat-topped hill between Blaina and Blaenavon is being considered by Blaenau Gwent council planning department.

It has asked for additional environmental impact studies to be conducted and these are now under way.

Mr Hart's ambition rests upon a yes/no decision to be made this winter. The Ebbw Vale native, whose family relocated to Newport to enable his father to jump from a doomed steelworks to a depleted one, has engineered a package of community benefits to incentivise the council and community.

These include the purchase of 650 acres of land to enhance Blaenavon's World Heritage Site: an annual premium of between £150,000 to £200,000 to be paid to three community trusts for local works; and up to 50 jobs through an Economy Power customer service centre.

It's a compelling offer, but the question is whether it will be enough to compensate critics who feel windmills create an eyesore on the landscape.

Mr Hart said: " It's a subjective issue and I respect people's feelings. I grew up staring at one large steelworks in Ebbw Vale and then moved next to another one in Newport.

"But I do think this scheme is a good application of technology. And it will produce sufficient power for between 20,000 and 25,000 homes." Mr Hart and his colleagues at Pennant Wind have worked full-time on planning the scheme since about 2001.

That's a long time to be self-financing a project and they stand to lose a lot of money if the council gives them a thumbs-down.

"We've paid the bills by acting as consultants on renewable energy deals. "For example, when National Wind Power (a subsidiary of RWE N-Power) sold 65 per cent of a wind scheme to a venture capital house we acted as technical advisers to the purchaser in what was a £400 million deal." There is plenty of money to be made out of windmills because of the politics of UK energy generation.

The UK government wants 20 per cent of the country's energy to come from renewable sources by 2020 and all producers must prove they are working towards this with renewable obligation certificates (ROCs). One ROC is earned by a wind farmer for every 1,000 kilowatt hours of electricity he or she generates.

Big electricity suppliers can purchase these ROCs from the windfarmers to demonstrate their commitment to renewable energy.

Recently a Sunday broadsheet calculated that a two-megawatt turbine costing £1.3m to build would generate £385,000 per year for 20 years. The newspaper argued that only £120,000 per year would come from the sale of electricity, with the other £265,000 coming from the sale of ROCs. These figures are somewhat speculative, but they demonstrate that renewable energy is one very big ball park.

Pennant Wind chose the north Gwent site for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that it's windy, there are not many people in the immediate vicinity, access is reasonable and - due to the region's heavy industrial past - power lines are already on site.

"The last reason is very significant because people don't want to see long chains of electricity pylons being constructed across the countryside. "That's why the west coast of Scotland - although very suitable for windmills - has been largely ruled out."

The windmills on the Gwent site would sbe 93 metres tall. They could be made by any one of a number of proprietary manufacturers such as GE, Siemens or Bonus (from Denmark).

Each contains a turbine in the bodywork behind the rotor and would be cabled up to transmit its energy directly into the national grid.

Mr Hart is a personal symbol for Gwent's transition from sunset to sunrise industries.

He began his career as a Llanwern apprentice and only decided to go to university when his steel bosses told him they couldn't offer him much of a future.

He took a degree in mining at Imperial College, London, and embarked on a worldwide career in mining and energy generation. This included a spell with BP in Alaska in its coal and precious metals business. After some years in the US Mr Hart returned to London and took a master's degree in business administration.

He joined the Central Electricity Generating Board during its privatisation. In the new entity of National Power Mr Hart acted as a consultant on energy projects in China, India, Australia and many parts of Europe.

He returned to Wales in 1996, taking a home in Monmouthshire and a job with Celtic Energy where he was responsible for bringing the Uskmouth power station at Newport back on line.

"It had basically been scrapped, but we discovered that for a relatively small spend we could bring it back to life."

Mr Hart said that throughout these years he was attuning himself to development issues and in particular to the economics and engineering challenges of renewable energy.

"I realised there were plenty of industrial land owners in this country who had never considered wind potential."

One of them, South Wales civil engineering company The Walters Group, has become an important ally. Mr Hat said: "It's a company with a long-term view and the imagination to consider various possibilities.

"Walters Group does have an option to invest in our project, but I think it is more interested in the engineering work which would be associated with constructing the wind farm."

So now it's down to Blaenau Gwent council and its planning officers. Locally and nationally the anti-windmill lobby is marshalling its forces for a last-ditch battle.

On the national stage Mr Hart suspects a lot of political maneuvers are going on behind the scenes.

"In its commitment to renewable energy the government is in danger of actually delivering on one of its major election pledges. "A lot of people don't want to see this happen."

Naturalist David Bellamy is being regularly trotted out for his opposition to wind power.

But he doesn't believe in the concept of global warming, and given the hundreds of distinguished scientists around the world who do, taking sides with him would be an extremely long odds bet.

The anti-windmill lobby has also started to laud the merits of nuclear power.

Mr Hart said: "You need to consider all the options and Britain should have a diversified energy generation portfolio.

"But nuclear is not so cheap when you taking into account decommissioning costs and centuries of contamination problems."