Town of Marshfield – The state’s newest energy crop is rising above the rolling farm fields overlooking Lake Winnebago in northeastern Fond du Lac County. While farmers throughout Wisconsin have planted more corn in recent years to make ethanol, some area farmers will soon receive payments for giving land over to another renewable resource: wind turbines.
More than 170 turbines sit atop towers in two new wind farm projects in Fond du Lac and Dodge counties. The new turbines will generate only a fraction of the state’s power needs, yet they are the most significant expansion yet of the state’s renewable energy efforts.
“It’s our future for energy, isn’t it?” said Melvin Olig of Mount Calvary as he took an afternoon walk on country roads with turbines on either side.
Proposals to build the turbines were floated five years ago, and the projects became controversial. Some homeowners worried that the towers would dramatically change the rural landscape, and they raised concerns about noise and other potential problems.
“It doesn’t bother me,” said Olig, who checks which way the wind is blowing each morning by looking out his kitchen window at the two turbines he can see from his home.
“Some people are quite up in arms about it, but if you’re doing something that’s legal on your own land, I don’t have a problem with it.”
Generating electricity
Drivers along U.S. Highway 41 see the new crop of turbines on the west side of the freeway near Brownsville and Lomira. Forty-seven of 86 turbines are now providing electricity for the Forward Wind Energy Center, owned by Chicago-based Invenergy Wind. Not all of the turbines are spinning, because the last of the towers were erected this month and are not yet connected to the power grid.
A few miles away to the northeast, about 30 of 88 turbines are connected at We Energies’ Blue Sky Green Field farm. Already, the two wind farms have tripled the amount of electricity Wisconsin has generated from wind for the past six years. When they are completely online later this spring, the two farms will generate enough power for 68,000 homes.
A new law says that by 2015, 10% of the state’s electricity must be generated from wind turbines, solar panels, landfill gas, cow-manure-to-energy systems and other renewable energy sources.
Andy Hesselbach, We Energies wind farm project manager, said the project will help the utility comply with an earlier requirement to supply at least 4.25% of its power from green sources by 2010.
John Bertram of the Town of Calumet is glad to see the We Energies project move ahead. He’s hosting one turbine at his 320-acre farm, where he grows corn, wheat, soybeans and alfalfa. Bertram said he’s glad to receive an annual payment for hosting the turbine and that additional payments to his town will help control property taxes.
“People don’t want dirty air, and so they don’t want it produced with coal, and they don’t want it produced with nuclear, and it seems like oil and gas aren’t in unlimited supplies,” he said.
“The wind blows every day, maybe not as strong some days as others, but it blows every day – and it blows all night, too.”
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