Falling in Love with Wind

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Moore felt strongly that his offer could bring new jobs, stabilize tax revenues, and elevate the quality of local schools, but to make it happen he would have to persuade more than 78 landowners to let him collect his data by erecting giant turbines on their land. He had to help the citizens of Tug Hill fall in love with wind.

Moore, a 59-year-old dairy farmer named Bill Burke belongs to the fifth generation of Burkes born on Tug Hill. He and his wife, Patricia, live in an Italianate-seeming white house with black shutters that is perched on the edge of the plateau, with wind turbines to the front and back. He's raised and milked cows on his 598 acres for more than 36 years and was just getting around to formulating his "exit strategy": Sell off 200 head of cattle, sell off equipment, sell off land, and settle down to a retirement blissfully free of debt. "I don't know if you know what it's like for us farmers," he says, "but most of us are in debt from the moment we start up in business. I bought out three farmers when I got started, and now there's no one left to replace me." He wouldn't go out of his way to encourage his son or daughter to follow in his footsteps: "No money in it." Maybe, he thought, he'd substitute-teach at the school where his wife was principal. Or maybe he'd sell seed or feed.

Then along came Moore, touting wind. "I was on board from day one," Burke says, "but I could see others would take some persuading. We'd hold meetings and no one would show up. Not because they opposed the idea. They just didn't think it would happen." Noting that there are more than 100 landowners, Burke says, "Getting them all to agree on something is like trying to herd ducks."

To educate themselves about Moore's proposition, Burke and his wife drove south to Madison County to inspect Moore's seven-turbine wind farm; five of the turbines are on the property of dairy farmers Carl and Bonnie Stone. The Burkes parked in the Stones' driveway, as many visitors do, and started asking questions. The Stones, who are unfailingly patient with the tourists, engineers, college students, and wind enthusiasts who come to gawk at their turbines, welcomed the Burkes in after hearing their story. Emboldened by what they learned, the Burkes soon agreed to allow the developer to collect data and ultimately to erect seven turbines on their property. The guaranteed income -- a minimum annual payment of about $6,000 per turbine, adjusted annually for inflation -- has transformed their lives. "It's paying for me to retire," says Bill Burke. "It's given us a chance to stay in our house," adds Patricia Burke. "We don't have to sell after all. We sold off the herd one spring, and the heifers later, and now we just have to decide what to do with the land." (They plan to lease to area farmers.) For now, Bill has given up the notion of selling seed. He and Patricia travel the state stumping for wind power.

At the heart of their acceptance of such a project in their own backyard was money. They had spent their lives dealing with the economics of the milking business; now their future, and that of their neighbors, was linked to the arcane economics of wind power.

The money behind wind power is as capricious as the wind itself. On and off for the last two decades, Congress has dangled subsidies like fluttering kite tails in front of eager wind developers, hence the inherently stop-start nature of the industry. Some years you get it, some years you don't. As a result, some years you build, some years you don't. All major energy producers get subsidies from the federal government, but Big Wind's take is puny. In 2003, the United States doled out somewhere between $37 billion and $64 billion in write-offs, low-interest loans, income and sales tax breaks, construction bonds, and so on to the energy sector. Of that, Big Wind -- companies engaged in industrial-scale wind power generation -- received perhaps 1 percent. The juiciest wind subsidy -- the Production Tax Credit (PTC), which credits wind developers 1.9 cents for every kilowatt-hour they produce -- is scheduled to expire at the end of 2008. Congress will most likely renew the PTC, but not before making Big Wind sweat it out. Meanwhile, developers are rushing to get wind farms operational before the deadline so they will be eligible for the credit.

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