from the Los Angeles Times
BAD AXE, MICH. – At a time when most people choose to avoid the harsh winter winds that roar past corn stubble and whip up billowing dust clouds over table-flat fields, farmers in Michigan’s Thumb now talk about catching the wind and all the money that comes with it.
Michigan’s first commercial wind farm — a collection of 32 towering turbines that conjure visions of H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds” — is scheduled to begin operating New Year’s Day, spurring for some a near-gold-rush mentality in this sparsely populated area.
Thousands of dollars in a guaranteed annual harvest come with each windmill placed on a farmer’s land, and that lure has gone a long way toward interrupting the horizontal sameness of vast corn and bean fields.
“I can’t wait ’til they get going,” said Bob Webber, who turned over easement rights on a portion of his property in Huron County for a proposed second wind farm, with 42 turbines.
For generations, the tallest structures in the agricultural Midwest have been grain elevators. But the rapid growth of the wind-power industry is altering the landscape in states such as Iowa, which has about 960 turbines, and Minnesota, which has about 860, according to the trade group American Wind Energy Assn. Iowa and Minnesota rank third and fifth, respectively, in annual electrical power generated by wind. A utility executive in Detroit said he envisioned the tip of Michigan’s Thumb planted with more than 1,000 turbines…