Falling in Love with Wind

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The county divides the revenue among towns according to the number of turbines they host. Martinsburg, a town of only 1,249 people, has 102 turbines. Though it typically collects $370,000 a year in property taxes, tiny Martinsburg's first payment from Maple Ridge, for the first phase of construction, amounted to $1.13 million. Harrisburg, population 423, with 78 turbines, received $1 million. Lowville, with a population of 4,548, reaped only $110,000, since the windmills there number just 15. "Obviously, money like that can do a lot of good in a community like this," Thisse says. "We had to hire a consultant just to help us invest it. The goal is to operate solely on the interest. It's a nice situation to be in. We've got 60 miles of dirt roads in town. So we're probably going to be able to finally pave them." By agreement among all the towns, local schools get the largest share, 40 percent, or at least $3.4 million annually, according to the most current figures. This last disbursement is widely regarded as the smartest investment in Lewis County's future.

A grandmother of two and former middle school principal, Patricia Burke is looking at the big picture. "Our town's population is steady but there's been no growth in years," she says. "We're looking at this as a way to provide jobs and maybe keep some of our children here." Thus far, it has certainly worked for the Burkes: Their son, Robert, landed a job in the operations department at Maple Ridge, and Robert's wife, Jenny, was hired by Moore to run the project's downtown office, just above the JC Penney catalog store.

Still younger residents have also fared well. Not far from the Burkes' home is the sprawling log cabin owned by Kyle and Betsey Burbank. Kyle, a veterinarian, was captivated by the proposal Moore made one day over coffee in the family's kitchen. But Betsey, a home-schooling mom, was fearful that the windmills would be harmful to the couple and their sons. "We went down to visit some of the other windmills. I got some articles and read up on the topic," she remembers. She was satisfied that there was no such danger. "After that, I was gung ho." Today the family hosts four turbines on their 250-acre farm.

On a recent morning, the three older Burbank boys, who range in age from 6 to 11, are crowded around the kitchen table, anxious to finish up their math worksheets so they can tend to the Holstein cows they are rearing for the 4-H club. Betsey explains that construction of the windmills was a major event at their home, taped via camcorder and incorporated into her sons' lesson plans on green energy. Perhaps more significant, though, is the fact that the Burbanks are socking away the income from the four turbines -- about $26,400 annually -- in a college fund for their sons, who now number four. (Newborn Isaiah is upstairs sleeping.) In fact, says Betsey, the boys have each claimed a wind turbine, joshing the others about whose blades are turning -- and earning -- the most.

Josiah, age 11, hears his mom talking and leaps up from the table. "Ooh, ooh, can I show them?" he pleads. When she acquiesces, he rushes to the edge of the porch and points to the turbines rising on the horizon above the stark, flat pastureland. The wind is biting. He is dressed only in plaid shirt, jeans, and socks. "That one's mine ," he says proudly, shouting to be heard over the baying of his father's beagles. "That's Abraham's. That's Malachi's. And if you look over here, around the porch, you can see Isaiah's."

For those who oppose large-scale wind projects, Tug Hill has become a symbol of wind gone wrong. A 21-minute amateur film, "Voices of Tug Hill," can be found not only on YouTube but anywhere citizens debate the merits of major wind projects. In the film, a handful of Lewis County residents blame Maple Ridge for a multitude of sins that can never be righted or explained away: the spoiling of their landscape (or "viewshed," in industry-speak), the sound of the whirling turbines, the potential threat to wildlife. Naysayers always say they are not against wind power per se, but against industrial wind power, against corporate intrusion into their small-town, pastoral spaces. Anne Britton, an activist and a resident of Brandon, New York, about 106 miles northeast of Lowville, says, "It's about big companies making money. They're laughing at us. They're collecting their money and going back home." Thanks to Britton's efforts, Brandon declared a six-month moratorium on large-scale wind projects last fall and extended it for another 12 months in spring 2007. "We're hoping that if we kick up a fuss, they'll just go away," Britton says.

While Maple Ridge was still in the planning stages, Moore hired Paul Kerlinger, a migration biologist who often consults with wind power companies, to document over four years the number of dead birds or bats found beneath the turbines. Kerlinger says the study is not complete. A preliminary report shows that bird deaths have numbered in the hundreds annually -- but that a potentially more worrisome number of bats have been killed. No one knows why. One theory is that bats switch off their sonar while migrating. Maple Ridge is exploring technology that will make the turbines more obvious, or less attractive, to migrating bats.

On the sound issue, Moore says that modern turbines generate less noise -- about 50 decibels, the volume of a refrigerator hum -- than their clunkier predecessors. But hearing is strongly personal, and what people hear depends very much on wind activity at ground level, where people actually live. Some people swear they can hear turbines on a low-wind day in their homes with the windows open. Some say they hear nothing. Others say they do hear a hum over long distances but have so habituated themselves to the noise that they manage to ignore it. But Gordon Yancey, whose tavern commands a majestic spot on the plateau, says he despises the whooshing sound of windmills. His neighbors dismiss his comments, since he rents snowmobiles for a living -- and what could be noisier than snowmobiles? "Well," he says, "let's look at that. A snowmobile makes a lot of noise but then it goes away. These things are like being next to a freight train that never arrives."

Moore thinks that those who object to wind power are in the minority. "This all comes down to an emotional reaction to change," he says. "They don't like the way the turbines look or the way they have transformed their viewshed, so they come up with a semiscientific argument to sound cogent. The majority of people in Lewis County like the project. But this is all a highly subjective thing." In other words, he could talk himself hoarse and he'd never persuade everyone.

Ultimately, what makes Maple Ridge so interesting and so important is that never before on the East Coast have so many instruments of electrical generation been inserted into the domain of the private citizen. It's one thing to know that your electricity comes from a coal-fired or nuclear power plant six counties over. It's another thing entirely to accept gigantic whirligigs on your own land, to share your life with them, to stake your children's future on them, and to bequeath the financial legacy to your grandchildren. We make concessions every day for the other fuels and tools in our lives: Oil and coal pollute our water, air, and bodies; nukes leave us with centuries of toxic waste; heck, compact fluorescents contain mercury, even as they lead us to a bigger goal. There's no free lunch here, and Maple Ridge may be an education for us all as we head into the renewable energy future so many of us say we want.

For Moore, 51 and a self-described child of the sixties, this project is part of a larger personal goal that goes back more than 25 years, when he wrote his undergraduate thesis on energy regulation. "I've wanted to do this for years, show people that renewables are real, that they are here and now," he says. "Every time I drive to Lowville and see that plateau with the wind coming across it and the turbines catching it, I get a big thrill."