If you think you own land attractive to a wind farm developer, you should carefully consider the various issues to be discussed and resolved in any agreement. These include the amount of land you are willing to commit, the duration of the contract, the amount and type of payment you would receive, and provisions for withdrawing from the contract (either by the developer or yourself).

You should also consider what type of business arrangement you want to pursue. The lowest-risk and simplest arrangement is to sign a lease or other agreement with a developer, and let them handle the responsibilities and risks. The highest-risk approach is to become a developer yourself, assessing the wind resource, selecting the turbines, arranging for construction, and providing or contracting for ongoing operations. In between, there are a number of other options, including partnerships and cooperatives.

Windustry provides a number of helpful tools for your considerations, include Wind Opportunities: Leasing Land and Wind Energy Easements, a Wind Power Calculator, and Wind Basics fact sheets. The University of North Dakota also offers a useful publication, Harvesting the Wind: A Landowners' Guide to Wind Development in the Great Plains.

Leasing to Developers

By far the vast preponderance of wind development on farms follows this model. Landowners often initially receive $1,000-3,000 from developers for wind resource assessments. If developers decide to go ahead, they typically sign a 30-year lease agreement that provides a portion of annual gross revenue, generally 2-3% on a quarterly basis, typically earning $1,500-2,000 annually for 30 years per each large-scale wind turbine.

Depending on the site, a 1,000-acre farm can easily accommodate 10 turbines, with each turbine taking one-half acre to two acres out of crop production (mostly for access roads). Outside that small footprint, farm operations continue as usual. With earnings on many major farm commodities running $100/acre or less, the attraction of harvesting the wind is obvious.

Wind turbines are spaced in different configurations depending on the topography of the land and the size of the turbines. A utility-scale wind farm is typically composed of dozens of turbines. Cables carrying the electricity run underground from the wind turbines to the substation and grid, and don’t interfere with the landscape or farming activities.

A good wind resource alone is not enough to attract a developer to a site. Several other conditions must be present for a wind farm to be viable and profitable, including access to transmission lines and ready markets for the electricity. State legislation, customer demand for green power, and utility interest in wind power as a hedge against volatility in prices and supply of natural gas, are among the factors that create a market for wind farm development.

Local Ownership

Another option finds farmers themselves erecting utility-scale turbines individually or in clusters, and typically generating 1-5 MW of power for sale to utilities. This form of large-scale distributed generation is known as the European Model. Ownership of distributed wind clusters by rural cooperatives and individual landowners has marked wind growth in Denmark, the world’s largest maker of wind equipment, and Germany, the global leader in wind energy generation. In the Northwest, the first community wind project is underway at Luna Point.

If you’re thinking about owning and operating a larger-scale facility, review the wealth of information available at Windustry’s Community Wind Energy Information Clearinghouse. Then, take a look at the Community Wind Financing Handbook from the Environmental Law and Policy Center, and A Comparative Analysis of Business Structures Suitable for Farmer-Owned Wind Power Projects in the United States from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Finally, view American Wind Energy Association’s publications on Utility-Scale Wind and 10 Steps in Building a Wind Farm, and explore interconnection issues, incentive programs, and other issues at AWEA’s invaluable State-by-State Guide.

For further information on resources and opportunities, contact the staff lead for the Wind Powering America program in your state:

Idaho: Gerald Fleischman, 208-327-7959

Montana: Mark Hines, 406-444-6769

Oregon: Carel DeWinkel, 503-378-6099

Washington: Mike Nelson, 206-396-8446