U.S. renewable-energy goals may depend on land-use decisions in rural areas about wind farms, which are divisive

The 10th of 19 meetings in Piatt County, Illinois, about a proposed
wind farm. (Photo by Mustafa Hussain,The New York Times)

The scramble to prevent further global warming has been labeled "a slog," "a matted hairball," "snake-bitten" and even "a fight to the death." Rarely is it described as "a rural decision," but that's what it could boil down to: "While policymakers may set lofty goals, the future of the American power grid is in fact being determined in town halls, county courthouses and community buildings across the country. . . . The only way ambitious goals will be met is if rural communities, which have large tracts of land necessary for commercial wind and solar farms, can be persuaded to embrace renewable energy projects. Lots of them," reports David Gelles of The New York Times.

One example is Piatt County, Illinois, pop. 16,000, which scheduled 19 nights of meetings to debate the Goose Creek Wind farm proposal. In Monticello, "Depressed property values. Flickering shadows. Falling ice. One by one, a real estate appraiser rattled off what he said were the deleterious effects of wind farms as a crowd in an agricultural community in central Illinois hung on his every word," Gelles reports. "It was the tenth night of hearings by the Piatt County zoning board, as a tiny town debated the merits of a proposed industrial wind farm that would see dozens of enormous turbines rise from the nearby soybean and corn fields."

Monticello residents' reasons for opposing the wind farm include everything from "ugliness" to how it could alter soil drainage to the intrusion of corporate American into rural life, Gelles writes.

The federal government is "pumping a record $370 billion into clean energy, President Biden wants the nation’s electricity to be 100 percent carbon-free by 2035, and many states and utilities plan to ramp up wind and solar power," Gelles writes. "According to an analysis by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the United States would need to construct more than 6,000 projects like the Monticello one in order to run the economy on solar, wind, nuclear or other forms of nonpolluting energy."

The linchpin for wind power's success is land. Sarah Banas Mills, a lecturer at the school for environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan, who has studied renewable development in the Midwest, told Gilles,"Projects have been getting more contentious. The low-hanging-fruit places have been taken."