WIND IN THE HEARTLAND

Wind Power: New Shade of Green Dominates Iowa Landscape (Part 1)
Christina Davidson, August 10, 2009 (Atlantic)
and
Wind Power: New Shade of Green Dominates Iowa Landscape (Part 2)
Christina Davidson, August 11, 2009 (Atlantic)

SUMMARY
On her journey across the country to chronicle the impacts of the recession, journalist/photographer Christina Davidson observed the wind boom in Iowa.

In Walnut, Iowa, (population 900) she observed that the natural ag-country attention to weather has honed in on a special attribute, the winds.

Landowners in Iowa are finding they can derive significant income, perhaps a whole living or as much as they need to supplement their farms’ outputs, by leasing land to wind developers for turbines.

One of Ms. Davidson's superb photos of Iowa wind. (From The Atlantic - click to enlarge)

Non-landowning residents are finding work building and maintaining the turbines.

But Davidson also discovered the wind industry is having much bigger impacts.

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The U.S. wind industry is the world’s fastest growing market. A U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) 2008 study concluded it is entirely feasible that the U.S. wind industry can provide 20% of the nation's power by 2030. It now provides about 1.9% of U.S. power. That means growth.

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Like the growth between 2006 and 2008, when U.S. installed capacity went from 26,589 megawatts to 52,026 megawatts. Like the growth the wind industry has sustained even during the 2008/09 recession. Like the growth in Iowa between 2006 and 2008, when wind went from being 5% of the state’s energy to being 15-to-17% of its energy and reached an installed capacity of 2,791 megawatts to become the 2nd biggest wind-producing state in the country. Like the growth Iowa has seen in 2009, when it went to 3,043 megawatts. Despite the recession’s credit crunch and a slight downturn in local manufacturing, and thanks in part to the wind industry, Iowa has kept its unemployment rate down to 6.2%.

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Davidson discovered that the growth of the wind industry in Iowa has been accompanied by a growing awareness not necessarily found in places where New Energy has yet to have an impact. It is a realization beyond the insight that dependence on imported energy is burdening the nation. It is the realization that even pursuing production of the small amount of domestic fossil fuels remaining does little to foster energy independence and worsens all the consequences of fossil fuel spew.

Iowans are beginning to understand on an experiential level that wind power is an emissions-free, endlessly abundant domestic energy that will serve the nation and protect it against the vagaries and violence all around the world and especially from the the vagaries and violence in the places where there is oil that have already cost so much blood and treasure.

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COMMENTARY
DOE has $20 billion in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), or stimulus package, funds for spending and loan guarantees to develop a national transmission superhighway with Smart Grid capability and $93 million in ARRA funds to finance wind research and development projects.

A recent Harvard University study of Great Plains wind concluded that the central U.S. from North Dakota to Texas could produce 16 times the average electricity used by the entire nation. With modern wind technology and an adequate national high voltage smart tranmission system to deliver wind-generated electricity from the Plains to urban demand centers, Davidson envisions Iowa, Oklahoma, and Nebraska becoming energy capitals.

But there is more.

Walnut was once a Highway stop for tourists checking out antique shops. Now tourists pull over to study the 102-turbine wind installation with its 263-foot steel towers, each with 3 gracefully rotating 126-foot rotor blades, higher overhead than the Statue of Liberty's torch.

One of Ms. Davidson's superb photos of Iowa wind. (From The Atlantic - click to enlarge)

One shop in Walnut has, this summer, sold 80 tee shirts and ~200 beer cozies silk-screened with "Antique City" and "Wind Mill City" labels. Doing the silk-screening was business for the local printer. The labels were designed by a man working on the crew that built the turbines who had lost his auto industry job. The crew has since moved on to another wind installation, though there is a maintenance crew in place.

Some unemployed locals joined that construction crew and worked in Walnut from August 2008 through April 2009 and continue in full time positions. The crew was a 30% increase in Walnut’s population and a financial shot in the arm for its grocery stores, restaurants, bars, gas stations, hotels, and landlords.

60 Walnut landowners became wind farmers. MidAmerican Energy, Iowa’s biggest utility and a subsidiary of Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway, paid $5 per acre just for the right to survey. Those whose land was not chosen continue to earn $10 per acre per year from Mid-American as an option on future installation rights.

Each turbine that was installed takes up a half-acre. The landowner got an initial easement payment and earns $3,500 yearly with a guaranteed 2% per year increase.

One of Ms. Davidson's superb photos of Iowa wind. (From The Atlantic - click to enlarge)

Mid-American purchased 9 acres from yet another landowner for the weather and wind meteorological tower and computerized substation that operates the entire Walnut wind installation.

Much of that money, of course, has found or will find its way into the local economy. For a small town like Walnut, this is revitalizing economic activity.

Early in the process of development, there were Walnut residents who objected to the installation, fearing turbines would blot the landscape or that the noise would be oppressive. None of their fears have been realized and most locals like to joke that the only ones now who don’t like the installation are the ones who didn’t get turbines on their land.

As the financial benefits redound and spread, even those objectors are growing fewer.

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QUOTES
- Leo Rechtenbach, landowner and turbine land leasor: "The conversation when you're out for coffee now is: 'You think the wind is blowing enough to get 'em going today?,'" says, referring to the 102 wind turbines that sprouted from fields and pastures of his rural community in the past year.
- Davidson: “With a better grid in place, I like to imagine Iowa, Oklahoma, and Nebraska becoming like the Dubai, UAE and Saudi Arabia of wind power--minus the authoritarian regimes, abuse of women, and financing of religious extremists.”
- Davidson: “I would never try to argue that the growth of the wind power industry in Iowa has been the sole factor protecting the state from ill-effects of the recession…I am not even plying in various projections regarding the number of green jobs stimulus money will help create. Every faction putting forth estimates on that subject has a motivation to adopt either an overly rosy or overly pessimistic perspective. Considering the number of factors that could come to play in the long-term outlook, I don't actually believe it possible to assess that figure with any reasonable degree of accuracy. However, jobs will inevitably be created by the expansion of any new industry--particularly one that taps into the vision of that inevitable future in which fossil fuels will increasingly become an anachronism.”
- Julia Byron, owner, Walnut Old Tyme Quilting: "We should be tapping into our own resources in this country, instead of relying on other countries."
- Elaine Snedden, quilter and Walnut resident: "Yes. Wind, water, and sun."

One of Ms. Davidson's superb photos of Iowa wind. (From The Atlantic - click to enlarge)

- Davidson: “The Rechtenbachs have lived in the 19th-century white farmhouse just south of downtown Walnut for 45 years. Pulling into their gravel driveway, a kind of cognitive dissonance that has ebbed and flowed all day returns when I see their classic red barn with the white trim and fence set against a backdrop of four wind turbines. The incongruous visual imagery makes me think of what would result if a Grant Wood painting morphed halfway into a sci-fi movie poster…I feel like the unspoiled forests, cornfields, and undulating hills out the window of my own rural upbringing form an indelible part of my identity--as if the iron-rich red soil of southern Indiana permanently melded with the blood in my veins. Even if monstrous mechanical apparatus did not fill me with (admittedly irrational) dread, I don't think I could ever willingly accept an encroachment of modern machinery on the region's natural beauty.”
- Jeanette Rechtenbach: "We like it. We think it's neat. It's interesting…Some people say they're ugly…[They’re] graceful…"
- Leo Rechtenbach: "They're not ugly. They're clean. Clean energy. Good for the environment… the only [ones] that don't like 'em are the ones that didn't get 'em."
- Davidson: “ Heading out to my car later, I can scarcely hear the swoosh and hum of turbines over an almost deafening natural racket of trilling wrens, the stridulating buzz of countless grasshoppers, and bleating goats in the barnyard. Pulling up to the one stop sign on Antique Street in the center of Walnut, I notice a decal stuck in the rear window of a sparkling new Ford F-150 in front of me. It reads: ‘Got Wind?’”