Des Moines Register, August 13, 2008

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Everything is bigger about wind energy these days.

The towers are taller, and the rotating turbines have greater diameter. Leases to landowners are becoming more lucrative.

But as "big wind" owned by utilities and merchant generators gets bigger, voices for "little wind" - people who want to build backyard generators or farmers unhappy about the effects of towers - are beginning to make themselves heard.

"Things are fine for big wind," said Gregg Heide, a farmer in rural Pomeroy in northern Calhoun County who has become an iconoclastic voice against big wind farms. "But Warren Buffett and MidAmerican Energy are making most of the money."

Heide and some rural Iowans protest federal rules that allow utilities and cooperatives to buy surplus electricity from smaller private wind generators at wholesale cost.

That means a private turbine operator who wants to recoup the cost of the turbine by selling surplus electricity to the grid might get as little as 2 cents per kilowatt hour vs. the 8 to 10 cents per kilowatt hour charged by utilities or the 12 to 14 cents per kilowatt hour charged by some cooperatives in sparsely populated areas.

Large project near Adair

The symbol of wind's growing power can be seen along the north side of Interstate Highway 80 just west of Adair on the 76-turbine, 174.8-megawatt wind farm MidAmerican Energy is developing. The turbine blades rotate around a diameter of 300 feet atop 265-foot towers, making the devices the largest built in Iowa. One megawatt will power about 700 homes.

When the Adair County/Cass County project is finished this year, MidAmerican will generate almost 20 percent of its electricity by wind, the most of any investor-owned U.S. utility.

"We're getting more and more economies of scale with the bigger turbines and larger wind farms," said Tom Budler, MidAmerican's manager for wind development. "We can generate 2.3 megawatts off each turbine."

Cause for concern

Iowa ranks first in the nation in its percentage of electricity generated by wind. But even such renewable energy sources can cause damage.

"If you're a farmer and used to a quiet environment, a wind turbine changes everything," said Heide, whose Pocahontas County farm sits amid a MidAmerican wind farm completed two years ago.

At a meeting last week in Malcom, Heide warned landowners about broken tiles, damaged roads and fences during turbine construction, and noise and shadows from rotating turbines. The meeting was called to discuss a proposed wind farm in Poweshiek County by TradeWind Energy of Lenexa, Kan.

Heide is trying to build his own turbine project. He has tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Legislature to put more controls on wind farm construction and require utilities and cooperatives to buy surplus electricity from individual owners at retail cost.

"Our laws and policies are outdated," Heide said.

Improved payments

Wind energy proprietors are responding in the most direct way, with improved leases. The $2,000-per-turbine annual payment that was standard for years has been at least doubled in recent months.

"We're seeing more lucrative leases than in the past," said Neil Hamilton, a Drake University professor who follows wind law.

TradeWind is offering landowners $5,000 per megawatt, which comes to $7,500 annually for the 1.5-megawatt turbines planned, or an undisclosed percentage of revenue from the turbine's electricity, whichever is higher.

Kansas City lawyer Reed Bartels, who represented TradeWind at the Malcom meeting, didn't sugarcoat the effects of a wind farm.

"The construction isn't pretty," Bartels said. "It's dirty. Tiles will break. We're not going to promise a lot of new jobs. Most of the jobs are very technical and require specialized skills that most communities don't have.

"Frankly, the local person who gains the most economically from the wind farm is probably the guy who owns the local rock quarry."

Gravel is needed to stabilize the ground around wind towers.

Hamilton said he was impressed by TradeWind's offer of a percentage of the turbine's revenues, which he said is the closest any lease has come to the long-standing practice in the oil and gas industry of paying royalties based on production.

"That's an important new development for Iowa," said Hamilton, who has created a course in wind law at Drake and is often called to review leases and proposals.

"For too long we've made the mistake of thinking too small, acting like a colony and letting others come in and purchase our resources," he said. "The ethanol industry has shown what can be done if you think on a big scale, and it has attracted capital. Wind energy can do the same thing."