Calhan neighbors oppose wind farm expansion, citing health concerns 

Rebecca Nusbaum came home from work one day in June to find a sticky note on her front door.

Someone was interested in talking to her about a local wind turbine project.

“Huh,” she thought.

Nusbaum already can see all 145 wind turbines of the Golden West Wind Energy Center from the back deck of her home in Calhan.

When she called the number, she said the man who answered said he works on behalf of NextEra Energy Resources, a subsidiary of Next Era Energy Inc.

Nine years ago, the publicly traded, Florida-based company erected a fleet of wind turbines in the area, and today, all highway drivers see miles of the otherworldly machines on the skyline of El Paso County’s Eastern Plains.

NextEra wants to expand with a third phase of construction, the man told Nusbaum, and he’s looking for additional property owners who might want wind turbines installed on their land.

“I said ‘no,’ I was not interested, for lots of reasons,” Nusbaum said.

While there are more questions than answers at this point, some residents are upset that more of the behemoth alternative-energy units could loom on the horizon.

In a case of dèjá vu from the original installation, there’s a new “No Wind Turbines” campaign circulating.

“They’re wanting to do more harm and destroy more land,” said Cindy, a former Calhan resident who asked to be identified only by her first name. “That place was gorgeous before they put them in.”

Cindy said she continues to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and ringing in the ears from living near the Calhan turbines for more than five years.

“We were close enough that it was affecting us,” she said. “From our house, we could see 120 turbines, and we could see lights flashing all the time, and at night it would sound like a train roaring in the distance.”

Homeowners fought long and hard to try to stop the wind project from being approved a decade ago.

Retired electrical engineer Sandra Wolfe and her husband joined a lawsuit against the project, which she said was dropped by lawyers representing the group because expenses kept mounting.

“We spent everything we had, and it was not enough at the time,” Wolfe said.

The couple also was part of a small trial study of litigants that Wolfe said showed every participant had symptoms of vasovagal syncope – a sudden drop in heart rate and blood pressure often related to a stressful trigger – which they attributed to the turbines.

Some residents have complained for years that the wind turbines brought on migraines, insomnia, heart irregularities, nausea, vomiting and inner ear conditions. And they point to electromagnetic interference, low-frequency waves called infrasonic sound and vibration from the turbines as harming their bodies.

“I know some people are OK with them,” Wolfe said. “But some people aren’t. They make them sick.”

Wolfe said a cardiologist told her she had been exposed to infrasound after she and others got sick when workers were trying to align the turbines before the blades were set in motion.

Health impacts debated

Patrick Moriarty of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden said his laboratory has not conducted studies on health issues related to wind turbines, but there have been many research projects over the years that he has analyzed.

Most have concluded “there is little evidence that wind turbines have direct health impacts and that annoyance is strongly correlated with attitudes towards wind energy and planning process fairness,” he said.

Some doctors, however, recognize wind turbine syndrome, a compilation of common symptoms reported by people who live in close proximity to turbines. The condition was identified in a 2009 book written by Dr. Nina Pierpont, who coined the term.

Nusbaum said she recognizes that her migraines worsen in the fall when severe “light flicker” happens, which is when the low sun on the horizon shines through the rotating turbine blades and casts a moving shadow.

“I can’t say there’s a sickness involved that is confirmed from the turbines, but I also would not deny if someone told me they are sick from them,” she said.

Though some people believe their health has been compromised, some residents say they aren’t bothered by the giant structures. Others see additional income potential.

“They’re not that much of a nuisance to us,” said Calhan resident Jezreel Bohlander.

She does not have wind turbines on her property, where her family has lived for more than three years, but they are close by.

Bohlander said outside of the noise, which she said can be loud, the turbines have become part of the landscape.

Since her property is in the middle of the corridor, Bohlander said she wouldn’t mind earning some money from having them installed on her land. Might as well, she said.

Other issues critics attribute to wind turbines is that they devalue property, adversely affect animals and lead to raptor fatalities.

Cindy said she and her husband had livestock and other animals die unexpectedly, which amounted to a loss of nearly $29,000 and led to foreclosure.

Wolfe said her property’s well was tainted with industrial chemicals that she believes originated from wind turbines. After 20 years of living in Calhan, she now spends much of her time on the Western Slope but continues to suffer ill effects from environmental contamination, she said.

Shrouded by nondisclosure?

Social media posts indicate that contracts between energy companies and private landowners include nondisclosure agreements that prevent people who have wind turbines on their property from speaking publicly about them.

In private conversations, Nusbaum said, “I have never met anybody yet who has them on their property who has anything positive to say about them.”

Nusbaum said she doesn’t judge anyone who contracts with an energy company because “everybody’s got to make their own decision on how their land pays for itself.”

But an apparent lack of transparency concerns rural residents, some of whom said they have seen signs appear recently in adjacent Elbert County announcing upcoming community meetings about installing new “meteorological towers on three private parcels to measure atmospheric conditions,” a process that precedes wind projects.

“We have no clear information on what their plan is; nobody can get any information. Everyone’s closed-mouth about it,” said Nusbaum, who has lived in the area for a decade.

The solicitor Nusbaum talked to did not respond to requests from The Gazette for an interview about the apparent expansion near Calhan.

An appeal for an interview to the NextEra marketing and communications department also proved unsuccessful.

Sarah Borchardt, a NextEra marketing official, asked that The Gazette send questions beforehand but did not directly answer them.

Instead, she emailed a statement that called the Golden West Wind Energy Center “a good example of a successful renewable energy project.”

Since the facility went online in 2015, its 145 turbines have been producing 249.4 megawatts of energy, Borchardt said, which powers an estimated 74,700 households.

The turbines in Calhan are not part Colorado Springs Utilities energy portfolio, said spokesperson Alex Trefry.

“Rather, our wind energy is generated in Logan County at the Springs Canyon Wind Energy Center,” he said.

Why the energy produced locally doesn’t stay local involves complexities of the energy markets, Trefry said.

To simplify, “this specific wind farm has not offered us the ability to offtake any of their energy,” he said.

Wind farms normally are built after the developer and a utility company strike an agreement.

“Working with energy developers for wind generation is something we are always monitoring and considering to meet our clean-energy goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2030,” Trefry said.

The wind energy produced in Calhan does go to other Colorado residents, however. Xcel Energy has a purchase agreement to buy wind energy from Golden West for Xcel’s 1.6 million customers in Colorado, according to spokeswoman Michelle Aguayo.

‘Tend to be controversial’

Craig Dossey, El Paso County’s planning director at the time the Calhan wind farm was proposed, served as the senior reviewer for the permitting process, which also required rezoning for a wind-energy overlay and rerouting transmission lines. He’s now president of Vertex Consulting Services, a land-development consulting firm in Colorado Springs that works on general development including utility projects.

Getting the wind farm proposal over the finish line was time-consuming and complex, he said, as the project drew objection and support.

“I got the phone calls, I sat through over 40 hours worth of hearings, and in the end, they got approved,” Dossey said.

County commissioners were split on the plan, but residents said when NextEra threatened a lawsuit, the proposal was green-lighted.

“Generally, those types of projects – whether it’s a power plant or wastewater treatment plant or a wind farm or solar – they tend to be controversial,” Dossey said.

“Those making money from it tend to see it favorably – a lot of folks were in favor of the wind farm because they were signing leases – and those that are only getting the negative impacts as part of it tend to be opposed.”

Nusbaum said she was told by the man who left a note on her door that NextEra wants to stretch Golden West Wind Energy Center in a triangular pattern north of Harrisville Road, which is just east of downtown Calhan.

Next Era declined comment.

Wolfe questions the potential effectiveness of an expansion.

“We were promised that more turbines in our region would be prevented because the overlay was already holding too many turbines for proper functionality of the units, and a new overlay would have to be established,” she said.

“If reasonable business is conducted, there will be no more industrial wind turbine units in that overlay or around it,” Wolfe said.

The Calhan development is about 13.5 miles away from Colorado’s largest wind project, the Rush Creek Wind Farm. Owned by Xcel Energy, the facility was commissioned in 2018 and extends 95,000 acres over Elbert, Lincoln, Kit Carson and Cheyenne counties.

Xcel is not pursuing any expansion of the Rush Creek facility, Aguayo said.

Rush Creek’s 300 turbines that were made by Vestas, a Colorado wind turbine manufacturer, generate 600 megawatts, which serve about 325,000 homes in the state, Aguayo said.

Whether more wind turbines for NextEra’s Golden West project get off the ground will come down to transmission-line capacity, said Dossey.

“That’s the limiting factor nationwide,” he said. “You can put turbines in some pretty remote areas of the country, you just don’t have existing transmission. Companies tend to go where the wind resources are favorable and primarily where the transmission is possible.”

For the Rush Creek Wind Farm, Xcel and its partner on the project, Invenergy, built two new substations to handle transmission.

Dossey surmises NextEra could tie into the Falcon substation if Golden West adds more turbines, which is where the current wind energy produced in Calhan is sent.

The market is favorable for progression, he added.

“With the increase in population, whether it’s solar or wind or natural-gas-fired power plants, those energy needs are going to continue,” Dossey said. “I don’t think we should be surprised by new projects – the demand is there.”

NextEra announced in June it would sell $2 billion of equity units to fund investments in its energy and power projects and reduce debt. According to its March financial report, the company had nearly $80 billion of debt.

Paula Reinbold, founder of the Community Action Coalition of Colorado, a group of rural residents opposed to Xcel Energy’s ultra high-voltage transmission lines running through their properties, wants to see more cause-and-effect research and other considerations for people affected by the presence of wind turbines.

“Neighbors are adversely affected at least as much as those leasing to turbine companies, but they’re not compensated,” she said. “Their property may become unsellable, yet they may have to move elsewhere for health reasons due to the turbines. This situation is terribly unjust.”

Her group is calling for farther setbacks from neighboring properties, a means of compensating disrupted neighbors, sufficient scientific and medical studies to determine adverse effects on humans and animals, and studies of whether local weather patterns change because of turbines.

“All of a sudden, it became ‘de rigueur’ to ‘go green,'” she said.

“If all aspects – mining of materials to build wind equipment, manufacturing of towers and blades, water usage to make the concrete to set the tower foundations, transport materials, maintenance – were considered, how ‘green’ is an industrial wind turbine, really? I don’t know that anyone knows that.”