This story was originally published by States Newsroom.

After a string of scandals and amid rising bills, lawmakers in statehouses across the country have been pushing legislation to curb utilities spending ratepayer money on lobbying, expert testimony in rate cases, goodwill advertising, charitable giving, trade association membership and other costs.

At least a dozen states have considered bills to limit how gas, water and electric utilities can spend customers’ money, according to a tracker maintained by the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group funded by environmental and climate-focused foundations that concentrates on utilities and fossil fuel interests.

Another, Louisiana, has opened a proceeding at its public service commission to investigate use of ratepayer cash on trade association dues, “activities meant to influence the outcome of any local, state, or federal legislation,” advertising expenses and other costs.

Michigan joined the party last week with the introduction of legislation to ban utility political spending. In states like Illinois, the push has been joined by groups like the AARP and the Citizens Utility Board, a state watchdog group, which said the legislation would “stop electric, gas and water utilities from charging us for a long list of expenses they rack up trying to raise our rates and further increase their political power.”

Three states — Maine, Colorado and Connecticut — have already signed similar bills into law. The legislation comes as natural gas bills have fallen but average residential electric prices in the U.S. climbed from 13.66 cents per kilowatt hour in 2021 to 15.93 cents per kilowatt hour in 2023, per the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That would mean a monthly bill going from $136.60 in 2021 to $159.30 in 2023 for a house that uses 1,000 kilowatt hours per month.

“It absolutely is a growing trend,” said Matt Kasper, the Energy and Policy Institute’s deputy director. “There’s a lot of eyes on the industry, how it’s operating.”

The institute published a report last year that scrutinized how electric and gas utilities use ratepayer money to “fund political machines that push legislation, curry favor with regulators and alter the outcomes of elections, sometimes even breaking laws in the process.”

Some of the lowlights include:

• A massive bribery scandal in Ohio involving FirstEnergy, a utility holding company that  paid nearly $61 million in bribes to the Ohio house speaker’s political organization in exchange for a nuclear plant bailout worth $1 billion to the company. A U.S. attorney called it “one of the largest public corruption conspiracies in Ohio history.”
• In Illinois, the state’s largest electric utility, Commonwealth Edison, or ComEd, showered the state House speaker’s allies with jobs, contracts and payments to grease the wheels for the company’s legislation. Three ex-lobbyists and a former CEO of the company were convicted by a federal jury last year for their roles in the scheme. The speaker’s trial is scheduled for later this year.
• Florida Power & Light, one of the largest utilities in the nation, is facing calls for a federal investigation over accusations of using political consultants to back “ghost candidates” in legislative races to draw votes away from candidates it opposed. It also took over a news website as “part of an elaborate, off-the-books political strategy to advocate for rate hikes, agitate for legislative favors, slam political opponents and eliminate anything  … (that) might undermine its near monopoly on selling power in the Sunshine State,” the Miami Herald reported. That’s not to mention accusations of hiring private investigators to follow a newspaper columnist who was critical of the company.

Other examples of questionable spending abound. In 2018, South Carolina lawmakers were flooded with bogus emails encouraging them to support Virginia utility giant Dominion Energy’s takeover of SCANA Corp., a company struggling under the weight of a failed nuclear project. Dominion denied having anything to do with the fake emails, which were sent by the Consumer Energy Alliance, a group that was then supported by Dominion. (The company is no longer listed as a CEA member).

Consumer Energy Alliance was also involved in a 2016 campaign to support a natural gas pipeline running through Ohio that involved sending 347 letters to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission using the names of locals — more than a dozen of whom signed affidavits denying they signed the letters —  including “an Ohio man who has been dead since 1998,” The Plain Dealer reported.

In Louisiana, Entergy was fined $5 million by the New Orleans City Council after actors hired by a public relations firm working for the utility showed up at public hearings to support a proposed power plant.

Arizona Public Service, which has 1.4 million electric customers in the state, spent $10 million in 2014 that was funneled to dark money groups to help elect its preferred members of the State Corporation Commission, which regulates utilities. That spending wasn’t revealed until 2019, when the company complied with a subpoena to release documents.

“Utilities are often using their ratepayer-funded political machines to slow the nation’s urgently-needed transition away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy,” the Energy & Policy Institute wrote. “Working hand-in-hand with their trade associations, the Edison Electric Institute and American Gas Association, utilities continue to fight tooth-and-nail against policies that enable the adoption of essential technologies like rooftop solar power, energy efficiency and building electrification.”

‘The appetite is there’

However, bills to curb utility influence spending can face an uphill fight, demonstrating the stronghold that the companies can have on state governments.

In Virginia, for example, another round of legislative attempts to prevent candidates from accepting donations from public service companies like Dominion Energy, the state’s largest electric utility and long the biggest corporate donor in Virginia politics, died in House and Senate committees. Both houses are controlled by Democrats.

“Time will tell what will happen,” Del. Josh Cole, a Democrat who was carrying the House version of the legislation, told the Virginia Mercury.  “The appetite is definitely there for it.”

A separate proceeding at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has been looking into the “rate recovery, reporting and accounting treatment of industry association dues and certain civic, political and related expenses.”

The Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor-owned electric utilities and is one of the trade groups affected by some of the state-level legislation, said electric customers benefit when its member companies “have a seat at the table,” adding that they are among the most regulated businesses in the nation.

“We engage on their behalf through lobbying, advocacy and regulatory proceedings as part of our work to ensure that electricity customers have the affordable, reliable and resilient clean energy they want and need. Engaging in discussions with policymakers and regulators is essential to achieving these outcomes,” EEI spokeswoman Sarah Durdaller said in a statement. “We bring unique expertise and insights on how policy proposals will affect business operations, the cost for capital, and, ultimately, our customers. … There are strict laws in place already to ensure that lobbying activities are always funded by shareholders not customers.”

The American Gas Association, which represents natural gas utilities, did not respond to a request for comment.

On Monday, across the street from the Washington, D.C., hotel where the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners was holding its winter policy meeting, a group of climate justice organizations held a rally to call attention to energy company influence, taking aim at corporate sponsorship of the event and a lack of progress on renewable power.

“When we see events like this where utility execs fund gatherings and hobnob with regulators …  we need to speak out,” said Sukrit Mishra, DC program director at Solar United Neighbors, a nonprofit that helps communities form solar co-ops. He voiced support for state legislative efforts as well as federal legislation introduced by U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, a Florida Democrat, to prevent utility companies from using ratepayer dollars to fund political activities.

“The public is ready to hold utilities accountable. We need regulators to do the same.”

State lawmakers seek to curb utility spending on politics, ads is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

A report prepared for the South Carolina state legislature and released last week determined that a range of electric market and transmission reforms — including creating a new independent organization to run the electric grid or joining an existing one — would bring  “substantial benefits” for customers, potentially as much as $362 million a year.

The report by the Brattle Group, a Boston consulting firm, stems from the V.C. Summer nuclear plant fiasco that saddled the state’s ratepayers with billions in cost overruns for reactors that were never built.

And it’s the latest chapter in a long-running saga over a southern-fried electric grid anomaly.

The majority of U.S. electric customers live in areas managed by regional transmission organizations, which coordinate the flow of electricity, ensure reliability, plan transmission projects and run electric markets. In large parts of the West, consumers benefit from a separate market that helps move low cost electricity around and manages congestion on transmission lines. But most of the Southeast remains dominated by a handful of large utility companies that have successfully thrown back attempts to bring them under any kind of similar arrangement.

“Basically, utilities have a lot of political power in the Southeast,” said Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, a consulting firm focused on integrating clean power into the grid. “It’s not like utilities didn’t have power in the Northeast or Midwest or California, but there was a strong movement 20 years ago to get to a more efficient type of market and utilities in the Southeast resisted any such efforts in their region.”

‘Unfettered control’

The South Carolina report, which got a lukewarm reception from lawmakers there, per the Charlotte Business Journal, comes as big employers like Google looking to meet corporate sustainability goals express frustration with the lack of market options in the Southeast and environmental groups, eager to speed up the renewable transition, push for a true wholesale market in the region.

“Utilities in the Southeast have pretty much unfettered control over which generation they use and they’re not subject to any meaningful competition,” said Nick Guidi, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. Guidi and other market proponents say bringing the Southeast into a regional transmission organization or other type of competitive market construct would bring down wholesale electric costs for consumers, improve reliability in the face of increasing severe weather and help get more cheap renewable power onto the grid.

However, utility companies and other opponents argue that regional transmission organizations and regional power markets add undue layers of complexity, reduce state oversight and take away control over utilities’ own operations. They also say state energy policy goals would take a backseat.

“We do not believe changing our integrated utility model is best for our customers and communities in North Carolina and South Carolina,” said Jeff Brooks, a spokesman for Duke Energy, which is headquartered in North Carolina and operates in both RTO and non-RTO areas.

“The report overstates savings and doesn’t account for administrative and joining costs. Participation in an RTO would keep our coal plants running much longer than currently planned and would transfer critical aspects of our operations into the hands of a federally-run body which is not accountable to the citizens, regulators and elected officials of the states we serve.”

Southern Company, which operates the dominant utilities in Georgia and Alabama as well as the smaller Mississippi Power, did not respond to a list of questions about a potential Southeastern wholesale electric market or regional transmission organization. But CEO Thomas Fanning told The New York Times last year that “we absolutely are superior in every regard to those markets over time.”

The South Carolina report estimates that the biggest benefits for the state’s electric customers would come from integrating with PJM, though that would also require its neighbor North Carolina to do so. A bill filed in the North Carolina General Assembly would put $500,000 forward for a study similar to the one South Carolina just performed, citing the rolling blackouts from Elliott as a reason. A 2019 North Carolina white paper, also by Brattle, commissioned by consumer advocacy and clean energy business groups, has estimated that an RTO-operated market could yield hundreds of millions of dollars a year in benefits for electric customers there.

‘Still better for consumers’

Generally, in a wholesale electric market, power plants compete to provide electricity to the grid. The cheapest generators run more, replacing output from more expensive plants and creating savings for consumers. That also allows utilities to buy power from the market when it’s less expensive than producing it themselves. Regional transmission organizations plan electric transmission projects on a regional basis, which can avoid redundant projects by neighboring utilities, as the Brattle group noted in the 2019 paper.

Gramlich said regional transmission organizations and the power markets they run also enable large, seamless transfers of power to improve efficiency during regular operations and keep the lights on when the grid is under stress, such as during Winter Storm Elliott, when Duke Energy was forced to implement rolling blackouts in the Carolinas. The Tennessee Valley Authority, which also operates outside of an RTO, did the same during the storm.

Though PJM, which runs the electric grid for neighboring Virginia, along with a small portion of North Carolina, and parts or all of 11 other states and the District of Columbia, also saw power plants hamstrung by the frigid weather, it avoided blackouts.

“It’s not in the utilities’ nature to give up control of some of the operations and planning,” Gramlich said. “Even with some of the warts on RTOs, it’s still better for consumers than just having a vertically integrated franchise monopoly that does everything.”

There are indeed tradeoffs involved in being part of a regional electric grid, said Kent Chandler, chairman of the Public Service Commission in Kentucky, which is part of two different RTOs — PJM and the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) — and also includes territory that isn’t in one.

“Outside of Texas we’re really the most unique state in terms of markets,” he said.

Being part of an RTO, he added, does mean giving up a “certain amount of control,” though he noted that varies considerably depending on how the organizations are set up.

“States are really on the outside looking in in PJM,” Chandler said, though he added that in other RTOs, notably MISO and Southwest Power Pool, “that is not the case.”

And while he’s not advocating for or against a new market or RTO in the Southeast, he thinks the pros outweigh the cons for Kentucky.

“Whatever shortcomings MISO or PJM have in terms of governance or transmission planning or whatever they are … they’re still better than not having the RTO,” he said. “I think the increase in reliability and the reduction in cost for market membership is better than not having them.”

Nevertheless, RTOs and power markets also add what can be immense levels of complexity and other headaches, like the long interconnection queues — essentially wait lists to connect to the grid that are holding up mostly new wind and solar projects — that have bedeviled MISO and PJM.

“RTOs are a 1990s idea that has yet to adapt to the clean energy era. The Brattle Study ignored the problems RTOs have encountered since being first rolled out by FERC 25 years ago,” the South Carolina AARP wrote in comments on the Brattle report. “RTOs are cumbersome, complicated, and expensive entities to deal with.“

Why it matters

The electric grid, utility regulation and electric markets are complicated. But everyone pays an electric bill, and the regimes that govern the power system all make a difference in the cost and the source of the electricity that gets delivered to homes and businesses.

The Western Energy Imbalance Market says it’s delivered $3.4 billion in “gross benefits” (defined as cost savings, integration of renewables and “improved operational efficiencies” such as the reduction in the need for reserve power ) since 2014. Southwest Power Pool says its markets provide more than $744 million a year in net savings for participants. Entergy, a company that operates utilities in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas and joined MISO amid prodding from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, said Louisiana customers saved $120 million in the first year of membership. PJM, the nation’s largest RTO serving some 65 million people, says its regional grid and market operations create anywhere from $3.2 billion to $4 billion in savings a year.

That’s big money, proponents of markets and RTOs say, and it could deliver real value for electric customers in the Southeast, who have some of the highest energy burdens (the proportion of household income required to pay energy bills) and bills in the nation.

One analysis by RMI, a nonprofit focused on decarbonization, posited that Southern Company, which has been under fire for climbing bills in Alabama and Georgia, says the utility giant could have saved its customers $1.5 billion between 2015 and 2020 if it was in a wholesale market that required “economic dispatch” of its coal plants, meaning operating them in order from lowest cost to highest and importing cheaper electricity from elsewhere.

“Millions of Southerners struggle to pay their monthly electric and gas bills. More customers are cost-burdened in the South than in any other part of the country, and more than a third of the region’s population has trouble paying their energy bills,” the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance, an Atlanta nonprofit, wrote in a report released last month. “Low-income households and people of color pay a higher financial and health price to power their homes than everyone else.”

Eric Gimon, a senior fellow at Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan energy and climate policy think tank, worked on a 2020 report that found a “fully competitive” Southeast wholesale electric market would generate $384 billion in regional savings, create 285,000 clean energy jobs and cut carbon emissions from the electric sector by 37 percent by 2040.

He said their study found that the biggest savings came when power plants were put under competitive pressure, adding that electric utilities or their parent companies often have an equity stake in the gas pipelines that feed their power plants and aren’t incentivized to change the generation mix for lower cost options like solar and battery storage.

“People in the Southeast are paying a lot more for energy than they need to in order to keep the status quo that profits the shareholders and investors in these large utilities,” Gimon said.

Remaining to be SEEM

Last year, a new market of sorts did launch for the Southeast. Called the Southeast Energy Exchange Market and founded by a group of regional utilities, the platform is intended to facilitate voluntary power trades between utilities.

“The SEEM platform will help save customers money and better integrate renewable resources, while ensuring all customers across the region realize the promise of renewables,” said Noel Black, Southern Company’s senior vice president of governmental affairs, when the market launched. 

But critics, including Guidi and Gramlich, say as currently constructed the Southeast Energy Exchange Market is woefully inadequate. Several environmental groups and other organizations are suing the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission over the market, arguing it flies in the face of allowing open access to transmission.

Guidi said the market “completely failed” during Winter Storm Elliott, when power exchanges were most needed, and has seen its trade volume decrease since it launched in November.

“It’s only been around for four months but you would hope to see some upward trend in trade volume,” Guidi said.

The market also lacks crucial aspects: independent governance, transparency and competition, among other shortcomings, they said. A Google attorney called the market a “nothing burger” at an energy conference in Atlanta last year.

“SEEM could be built into something real,” Gramlich said. “As it stands it’s just kind of nickels and dimes. It’s not really of any significance.”

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook and Twitter.

In the Southeast, where big utilities rule, calls for a real power market persist is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

BUCYRUS, Ohio — In four terms as a county elected official in northern Ohio, it was the most contentious issue Doug Weisenauer had ever seen.

The state legislature had newly empowered county governments to drastically restrict wind and solar power development, a process formerly overseen by the Ohio Power Siting Board, and the meetings of the three-member governing body for Crawford County — population 41,754 — suddenly started becoming a lot more animated. 

“As soon as Senate Bill 52 passed, the anti-wind people, they started converging on our weekly commissioners’ meetings and demanding that we do something,” said Weisenauer, a Republican, like the other two members of Crawford County Commission. 

Apex Clean Energy, a Virginia company, had been signing leases with locals for a proposed 300-megawatt wind farm, called Honey Creek, but Weisenauer was skeptical it would ever get built, saying in an interview he’d seen more than half a dozen would-be wind projects come and go. 

Ultimately, the commissioners voted 2-1 last year, with Weisenauer the lone no vote, for a 10-year ban on wind development. The commission’s decision was overwhelmingly upheld by county voters in a referendum last fall. 

“I said all along I am not telling people what they can and can’t do on their property,” Weisenauer said. “It got ugly. Our families have been split, friendships broken. It was bad for our community.”

Crawford County, of course, is far from an isolated case. Across the country — from suburban Virginia, rural Michigan, southern Tennessee and the sugar cane fields of Louisiana to the coasts of Maine and New Jersey and the deserts of Nevada — new renewable energy development has drawn heated opposition that has birthed, in many cases, bans, moratoriums and other restrictions. 

With states, corporations, utilities and the federal government setting aggressive renewable energy goals, as well as big tax incentives such as in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, wind and solar developers have been pushing projects that are igniting fierce battles over property rights, loss of farmland, climate change, aesthetics, the merits of renewable power and a host of other concerns. 

And those debates are often happening in a miasma of misinformation and skewed by political polarization. However, some who have seen the backlash to renewable development up close and personal also say developers need to do a better job of being upfront with communities and convincing them of the benefits of their projects.

“I’ve seen it getting worse and worse over the past four years. There’s a huge level of distrust,” said Tony Zartman, a former Paulding County, Ohio, elected official who now works for the Conservative Energy Network, which promotes market-based policies at all levels of government to promote a clean energy transition. 

‘We’re seeing so much opposition’

In a report updated last year, the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School found that “in nearly every state, local governments have enacted policies to block or restrict renewable energy facilities and local opposition has resulted in the delay or cancellation of particular projects.”

Not including what it called “reasonable regulations,” the 2022 edition of the report found 121 local policies (up 17.5% from 2021) that block or restrict renewable energy and 204 contested renewable energy facilities (up 23.6%). 

“This report demonstrates that ‘not in my backyard’ and other objections to renewable energy occur throughout the country and can delay or impede project development,” the report says.

In August, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory released a pair of data sets on local wind and solar energy zoning laws and ordinances. There were nearly 2,000 wind energy ordinances and almost 1,000 for solar energy. 

“The significant uncertainty created by difficulties in siting and permitting may make it more difficult for developers to sign contracts with buyers and/or obtain financing at a reasonable cost of capital,” said José Zayas, executive director of policy and programs at the American Council on Renewable Energy, a nonprofit pushing to transition the economy to renewable power.  

J.R. Tolbert, vice president of strategy and partnerships at Advanced Energy United, a trade association representing wind and solar developers, as well as energy efficiency, battery storage companies and other businesses, said local opposition is becoming a major obstacle.

“The siting issue in and of itself is an issue that is really important for us to address,” he said. “If we’re unable to site projects, then we’re unable to interconnect projects and we’re unable to deliver that energy.”

Decarbonizing the U.S. electric grid, which accounted for about a quarter of U.S. carbon emissions in 2020, not to mention the rest of the U.S. economy, will require vast new solar, wind and other resources, many experts agree. Doing so by 2035, the Biden administration’s goal, will require “rapid and sustained growth in installations of solar and wind generation capacity” that amounts to “more than four times the current annual deployment levels for each technology,” per another report in August by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. 

“My guess is that we’re going to need a lot of renewables built on public lands further west, just because we’re seeing so much opposition growing up, especially sort of the middle of the country that’s already very dense on wind,” said Rich Powell, CEO of Clear Path, a nonprofit policy group working to curb carbon emissions, during a panel discussion on the state of the electric grid since the deadly 2021 winter storm Uri.

‘Many more peoples’ backyards’

Indiana’s emblematic of some of those tensions. The state is simultaneously home to a solar project that’s one of the nation’s largest and lauded by Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb but also, increasingly, county regulations that restrict or outright prohibit wind and solar projects, per the Indianapolis Star. 

“We’ve got more than 120 renewable energy projects underway in Indiana,” said Dave Arland, a spokesman for Hoosiers for Renewables. “Some have faced opposition, and some have not. But obviously the trend — from our standpoint — is positive.” 

Part of the reason behind the growth in opposition is the nature of wind and solar power itself. Rather than a traditional coal, gas or nuclear power plant that might only be seen by a handful of neighbors, solar developments and wind turbines are more spread out and invite more NIMBY-style complaints.

“Plenty of people don’t have a strong opinion about wind and solar in the abstract,” said Ben Inskeep, program director at the Citizens Action Coalition, an Indiana consumer and environmental advocacy group. “It’s literally in many more peoples’ backyards.”

There’s also an ideological bent to some of the opposition, said Kerwin Olson, the coalition’s executive director who’s spent years working on energy policy in Indiana.

“The direction of discourse really pivoted when we elected President Obama,” he said. “You were a socialist if you supported wind and solar.” 

Though Zartman, the Republican former county commissioner from Ohio, acknowledged that some of the loudest pushback comes from conservatives, he said he sees a “mix” of motivation in opponents, including major resistance to changes to the skyline. (Some renewable projects even in famously liberal areas have sparked major opposition).

“I haven’t seen anywhere on a deed that it tells you you have control over your horizon and your view,” he said. 

‘It does have downsides’

Bob Sostakowski, who’s lived in Crawford County, Ohio, for more than two decades and joined the local anti-wind effort after he became aware of proposed projects popping up in his and neighboring communities, said there’s more than aesthetics at stake. 

“I had no opinion one way or another on wind until this,” Sostakowski, 48, said. “There’s an obvious and very provable negative impact on property values and people’s standard of living.”

Both Sostakowski and Kimberly Groth, 42, who lives in neighboring Seneca County and was heavily involved in the effort to defeat wind projects there and in Crawford, said it’s not reasonable to expect people in agricultural areas to put up with commercial wind farms.

“People want quality of life and people move to rural areas because of the peacefulness of it. When you introduce industrial scale wind over tens of thousands of acres, you’re interrupting that quality of life,” Groth said.

“I think we’ve heard for 20 to 30 years now about renewable energy and there’s just this assumption that it’s good and that it’s going to save us. So I think for me personally the more I looked into it, the more I realized it does have downsides. … Every form of energy has these pros and cons.” 

Sostatkowski rejected the notion that farmers and landowners should have the right to lease their property to big wind developers whether or not their neighbors agree.

“There is a big distinction between commercial farming and agriculture and the heavy industrial production of electricity,” he said. “At no point in our history has it been OK for people to do whatever they want.”

Sostatkowski added that when he was a kid, a bald eagle sighting was so rare, his parents would pull the family car over to catch a glimpse of one.

Decades later, the fact that a wind project can get a “take permit” for eagles or other protected birds that run into the blades is “unfathomable,” he said, for an intermittent energy generation source that takes up lots of space. 

“What a horrendous and irresponsible waste of resources, our manpower, our tax dollars and our wildlife,” he said.

‘It’s no inconvenience’

Matthew Eisenson, a fellow at the Renewable Energy Legal Defense Initiative at Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said many of the debates over local renewable energy siting take on similar contours. 

“In almost every one of these contested projects people talk about visual impacts,” Eisenson said. “Second most common is impact to property values. A lot of people cite impacts to health which are spurious.”

Autism. Livestock harm. Soil and water contamination. Sleep deprivation. Illness. Interference with emergency medical flights. Former President Donald Trump famously (and falsely) said wind turbines cause cancer.

Many of those dire consequences and more crop up in debates about wind and solar siting and populate the Facebook pages and websites that pop up to oppose renewable development. 

Whether “Wind Farm Syndrome” really exists or is a psychosomatic condition created by fear of turbines themselves has been debated for years. Numerous studies, including an inquiry funded by the Finnish government on inaudible “infrasound,” have found no evidence turbines cause any health effects.   

That’s not to say that there are no impacts from wind and solar. Utility scale solar takes up a lot of land, requiring anywhere from 5 to 10 acres per megawatt. And there can be big drainage and sediment pollution problems if developers are careless. Wind turbines are huge and visible for miles. They do kill thousands of birds and bats a year, though scientists are trying to make them less deadly. While it’s rare, they can catch fire or leak lubricating fluid. And like any piece of machinery, they can break. 

Mike Brady, 69, a farmer from Paulding County, Ohio, has 11 turbines on his 3,000 acres, where he grows corn and soybeans. The first became operational 12 years ago. 

“A turbine takes up maybe ¾ of an acre,” he said. “‘You just farm right around them. It’s a little inconvenient but for the price you’re getting paid it’s no inconvenience.” 

He says there is occasional “shadow flicker” (the effect of the sun shining through the turning turbine blades) and some noise.

“There is flicker at my house. It’ll maybe last five minutes. It just depends on the wind and the angle of the sun. We pull our drapes,” he said. “You’ll hear a noise at like 4 a.m. if you go outside because there’s no other noise. … You can hear a hum out of them. But it doesn’t keep you awake.” 

Once, a turbine blade broke, which made “quite a noise,” he said, and birds do get hit occasionally.

“They have done bird studies around a couple of my turbines,” he said. “They find one or two birds a year. Of course they assume that they hit the turbine.”

But both Brady and Zartman, the former Paulding County commissioner, said the turbines have been a windfall for rural Paulding’s local school and government coffers.

“As a county, we were virtually bankrupt,” Zartman said. Paulding, entirely reliant on agriculture and which had a population of about 19,000 as of 2021, had been hit hard by the recession that began in 2007. There was some resistance to hosting turbines, which he described as coming from out of state, but it never got much traction, he said.

“The anti group was telling everybody that our large commercial dairy farms would quit producing milk because of the noise and the flicker effect from the turbines. They told us all of our children would be autistic,” he said. “They never really got a firm foothold in our community. 

By 2019, wind development, then at 188 turbines, was pumping about $2.5 million in payments in lieu of taxes into the county budget, a local news outlet reported.

“All the school districts struggled with money. Now they’re doing quite well,” Brady said. 

‘It’s our land’

When part of their 300 acres of farmland in rural Seneca County, Ohio, was leased for a potential wind project, Anne Fry, a retired local teacher, and her husband were looking forward to the additional financial security a lease payment would provide, but also the influx of cash the project was expected to bring in for the local school system. 

“At first we were excited,” Fry said in an interview. “I was naive about so many things.”

She got a rude awakening at an early meeting on the project.

“I thought, ‘I can’t wait to see if there’s going to be a turbine on our land,” she said. “It was packed. I saw people, they were so angry they were shaking. They were furious. … They said it was all done in the dark of night, it was secretive. … I didn’t think anybody cared.” 

Ultimately, Seneca County Commissioners voted in November of 2021 to ban large wind and solar projects in all unincorporated areas of the county. 

“It’s our land. And if we want to grow corn, soybeans, or put green energy on our land, why is it someone else’s choice, who might live on a postage stamp size lot, to tell us what we can and cannot do with our land?” Fry said.

Indeed, hosting renewable development has become an attractive option for struggling farmers.

Per the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of U.S farms has fallen from a peak of 6.8 million in 1935 to about 2 million in 2021, down from 2.2 million in 2007. 

Farmers have been under financial pressure from the pandemic, a trade war with China (the world’s largest agricultural importer), severe weather events, depressed prices and rising costs of production like fuel, fertilizer, equipment and other inputs, said Andrew Walmsley, senior director of government affairs for the American. Farm Bureau Federation, which has six million members nationwide. 

Against that backdrop, leasing acreage for wind and solar can be a lifeline to financial stability.  

“It’s a great predicament to be in if you want to diversify income,” Walmsley said. “It also creates challenges in a lot of rural communities.” 

Many farmers lease some or all of the land they farm, and others are looking to buy more ground to take advantage of economies of scale. Siting renewable energy on prime farmland increases the cost of doing that, Walmsley noted.

“When that acreage is lost, that drives up the cost across the community. That’s the biggest rub,” he said. 

Dave Crum, 78, who lives in Crawford County and has a lease for what was going to be Apex’s Honey Creek project, said he was also surprised by the degree of resistance, including the landslide vote that upheld the commissioners’ wind ban.

“I can’t understand the difference between renting your land for crop land and renting your land for a wind turbine,” he said. “It’s baffling when you have things that you think will help the community and they don’t let it happen.”

Sitting at his dining room table on a frigid February morning, he compared the resistance to stories his grandfather, a local elected official, told him about people who cut down utility poles during rural electrification. 

“I’m not sour grapes. They voted to do that. Make sure you understand what you did,”  he said. “Crawford County’s a very conservative place. Sometimes it kicks them in the butt.”

Honey Creek, in addition to payments to hundreds of local landowners and neighbors, would have provided up to $2.7 million per year in new revenue for local schools, county services and township governments in Crawford, about $80 million over the life of the project, according to Apex Clean Energy.  

“We were very disappointed in the result of the vote, which embodies a dangerous and precedent-setting expansion of government authority over local property rights,” said Brian O’Shea, a spokesman for the company. “The result restricted and effectively seized the individual land rights of more than 500 Crawford County farmers and landowners, who lost the ability to decide what they wanted to do with their own property.”

In an email, Larry Schmidt, a Crawford commissioner who voted for the wind ban, said “very little dialogue took place between the anti-wind groups and the developers, making it difficult to have a conversation with a differing viewpoint.” 

Schmidt said he supported the wind ban to give locals a vote on the project.

“I favored this option because the developer indicated that they would challenge our decision by ballot,” Schmidt said, adding that he “pondered and prayed over this a lot,” before making up his mind.  

“I do feel we may be missing out on economic gains, however we are more densely populated and the voters have spoken and voted overwhelmingly against,” he said. “And we work for them.”

Selling communities on the merits

Tolbert, the vice president of strategy and partnerships at Advanced Energy United, the trade group, says renewable energy companies need to build a “bigger tent” to help sell communities on the merits of projects. 

“We need to make this as an industry about workforce development, putting people to work, delivering money that can come into your community to help pay for schools, fire and EMS and for all the programs communities need,” he said.

Developers also want regulatory certainty, he said, calling for more states to follow Illinois’ lead in setting statewide standards for wind and solar siting, an end run around the type of local opposition that snarled projects even in deep blue states. It can be politically tough, however, to water down or strip away local land use control, as lawmakers in neighboring Indiana found out when similar legislation setting statewide standards for wind and solar siting failed in 2021. Voluntary standards passed last year. Zayas, with ACORE, pointed to New York, which created an Office of Renewable Energy Siting to consolidate environmental review and permitting of major facilities into a single process.

“The reality is oftentimes what happens is a developer gets into the process, invests hundreds of thousands or millions in the process and a county can at the last moment change the rules on them,” Tolbert said. “That’s a process that isn’t fair.”

However, developers can also do more to build trust in communities. Zartman said. 

“They have a community in their target area for quite a while but then they start going out to try to get leases. They really don’t tell anyone openly that this is what they’re thinking until they’ve got quite a bit of the land leased,” he said. “By then they’ve invested oodles of money but they haven’t done anything to try to help public opinion.”

Both Sostakowski and Groth, the Ohio wind opponents, said a lack of advance notice from wind developers helped galvanize opposition. 

“By the time the community feeling on this becomes apparent the leases are already signed,” Groth said. 

Zartman said renewable companies need to sell communities on the benefits of projects “before you come in and try to steamroll your way” to approval.

“How do you get community support if that’s how you start?” he said. “I understand what they’re thinking but as a former public official it’s a lot easier for me to be on board with a project if I’m part of the original planning process.”

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Across the country, a big backlash to new renewables is mounting is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.