Via Bloomberg News:

Aug. 26 (Bloomberg) — Iberdrola SA and E.ON AG’s turbine dreams for the windswept Texas Panhandle may be stymied by the mating rituals of the lesser prairie chicken.
Wind-power developers such as E.ON are scouring sagebrush and grasslands for the presence of ground-dwelling chickens that could impede turbine construction plans. Once plentiful in the southern high plains, the bird has a high priority for listing under the Endangered Species Act, which would put at risk where as much as $11 billion in turbines that are part of the U.S.’s renewable-energy push can be built.
Federal protection for the chickens will hamper Texas’s plan to add 5,500 megawatts of wind power in the region by 2013, a 60 percent increase for the state. President Barack Obama wants to double all U.S. energy from renewable sources such as the wind and sun in three years to reduce dependence on imported oil and the greenhouse-gas emissions blamed for global warming.
“The windiest parts of some of these states seem to be the areas that still have bigger concentrations of prairie chickens,” E.ON chief development officer Patrick Woodson said in an Aug. 13 interview. “We need to plan for a worst-case scenario, which would be a listing.”