What do you think about the new wind farm proposal for Peoria Co

PeoriaIllinoisan : I tend to agree with you on this quandary. I am generally very supportive of green energy and I would love to see my Ameren bill go down. That being said, I would not want to live within ear-shot of a wind farm. Will be interesting to see how the application moves forward and what conditions might be added. Let alone if it passes or fails.

One thing McClean County discovered is that when you build wind farms, it controls sprawl. You can't build neighborhoods around those things. If you want to grow, you gotta look inward more.Years ago my father was offered a contract for a wind farm on some farmland he owned. It was a flat rate for 20 years. He turned it down. His reasoning was that if the value of the land jumped or the value of the electricity jumped, he benefited from none of that. Couple that with the inflation we have now and it is an even worse deal. Maybe farmers are being offered better deals today... but I doubt it. Farmers jump on it because it is guaranteed income. As some video I watched showed... if you don't want farmers building wind farms, then offer them a better deal on the crops they grow. The more they see their incomes tank, for whatever reason... the more tempting wind farms and data centers become.A case could be made that the weakening of farmers is intentional to help foster more data center growth... or wind farms.

I'd take a lease for a single wind turbine or cell tower over a solar farm. I've known a few farmers who gladly signed up for them during the initial round 15 to 20 years ago. The carve out of their field is minimal, basically one wind turbine every 40 acres. The Farm Bureau even came up with a standard template contract along with a 5 year impact formula for soil compaction during construction.The biggest push back here is with the folks who built rural residential homes on 5 acres or less. They don't have the acreage to gain a contract or enough for a buffer from the land owners that do. These folks ought to not be surprised that the same zoning code they're using to fight wind farms would readily allow large scale hog or chicken farming without any real restrictions. They moved out into Agricultural Zoning. Depriving the few willing land owners with enough property to enroll in a wind farm, could just as easily turn into a contract with Perdue Farms. Enjoy the smell of the country.