July 10, 2016
Iowa, Letters

Letter to the Editor: Wind energy inflates costs

Iowa Farmer Today | July 9, 2016 | www.iowafarmertoday.com

O’Brien County is reported to have the most productive soil and the highest price around, and now it is sporting a huge wind farm, taking land out of production and financed mostly by the government to support its “green energy” agenda.

Now Cherokee County, to the south, is being wooed and the names who are doing the wooing are some big farmers who are the first in a bidding war with a possible young farmer, driving up the land price. The government will pay the lion’s share of putting up the wind farm and related power grids, and farmers are promised, we’ve heard, $8,000 a year to have the turbines on their land.

In neighboring Plymouth Country sit wind turbines beside two hog buildings that were financed 80 percent by the government and have never run in three or four years. I asked a friend who had looked into that program but decided it wasn’t a wonderful as it sounded.

My husband and I went on our rural electric co-op’s energy tour up into the Dakotas and it really opened our eyes to how serious the coal industry is in clean coal. We saw reclaimed land that has to be put back exactly as it. It’s frustrating to see how the coal industry is bashed.

How many people won’t be able to afford their electric bills if the “greenies” get their way? Who will step in to help them out? You and I both know the answer to that question.

Julie French

Meriden, Iowa

URL to article:  https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2016/07/10/letter-to-the-editor-wind-energy-inflates-costs/