Here & Now

Hopes and Tensions over Renewable Energy in Rural Wisconsin

Frederica Freyberg:
As to the rising cost of energy, many people want to see an even bigger turn to renewable sources. Solar panel fields and wind turbines have been cropping up next to and on top of Wisconsin farms for a couple of decades now. But as reporter Steven Potter explains, not everyone is on board.

Steven Potter:
Tom Wilcox has farmed the same plots of land around his home in Clark County for more than 20 years.

Tom Wilcox:
Agriculture is good land use.

Steven Potter:
He’s admittedly old-fashioned with how he goes about it.

Tom Wilcox:
You got to understand, I farm like it’s 1950.

Steven Potter:
He uses older equipment to harvest his hay and soybeans, and he mixes his own corn feed for beef cattle, chickens and turkeys. And he prefers it that way.

Tom Wilcox:
It’s not that we’re making a lot of money on these animals. It’s the lifestyle.

Steven Potter:
But there is something that he feels threatens the work of farmers across Wisconsin. That’s the increase of renewable energy projects such as wind and solar power. He says that the acreage used for such projects is just too valuable.

Tom Wilcox:
At some point, we’re going to have to decide, you know, do we want to use up all this tillable land? And I personally, I don’t. We need to preserve our valuable farmland in the state of Wisconsin and really everywhere.

Steven Potter:
To advocate against these developments, Wilcox leads the volunteer group known as Farmland First. They attend community meetings, fairs and parades, and reach out to public officials to stop developments that have been proposed. He says most of his fellow rural Wisconsin residents don’t want wind turbines and solar panel fields near them.

Tom Wilcox:
If you go anywhere around here to a public forum, you wind up being like a 90/10 split and the residents really don’t want this. And usually the people that are for it are going to get paid.

Steven Potter:
Farmland First is actively opposing two projects nearby.

Tom Wilcox:
It’s basically a city of farms, and there’s too many people here for this kind of project.

Steven Potter:
On the other side of this energy debate, several utility companies and clean energy organizations are pushing to have more solar and wind projects, saying we need them.

Alex Beld:
It can be controversial, for sure.

Steven Potter:
Alex Beld is with Renew Wisconsin. They say renewable energy projects make economic sense.

Alex Beld:
The wind keeps blowing. The sun keeps shining. Those energy sources aren’t usually impacted by things like tariffs or, you know, global conflict.

Steven Potter:
Proponents also say the benefits go beyond just money.

Alex Beld:
Even if there wasn’t, at this point, a great economic argument to be made for renewables, there’s a huge environmental health and just human health argument to be made.

Steven Potter:
Beld says his group understands there’s resistance.

Alex Beld:
There are people who don’t want to see the landscape change or see farmland get used for something else.

Steven Potter:
But he says the needs outweigh the costs.

Alex Beld:
The goal is to, yeah, completely transform our economy and our energy system so that it’s all running on clean energy.

Steven Potter:
For the utility companies, renewable energy projects are big business.

Ben Lipari:
The renewables are a great way for us to make big and positive impacts in our communities.

Steven Potter:
Ben Lipari is in charge of commercial operations for Alliant Energy, one of the biggest public utility companies in the state.

Ben Lipari:
We have our wind portfolio that’s growing. We have our solar portfolio that’s established and one of the largest operating solar portfolios in the Upper Midwest.

Steven Potter:
He says Alliant strives for a mixed menu of energy production.

Ben Lipari:
There’s a need for natural gas and coal to support the around-the-clock energy needs. And then, as we’ve been committed for a number of years now, we think that there’s a critical role for renewables that don’t have fuel costs and are able to complement some of those traditional energy sources.

Steven Potter:
Lipari also points to local funding generated by taxing power per megawatt, that utility companies are required to pay.

Ben Lipari:
Let me start with solar. Over the last few years, we’ve brought 12 utility-scale projects online throughout the state. That’s enough power to support over 350,000 residential homes and businesses. In those communities, that’s providing critical shared revenues to support community projects. Over the life of those projects, that’s going to support communities upwards of $150 million.

Steven Potter:
Across Wisconsin, there are more than 20 large utility-scale solar panel fields. And for wind power, there are more than a dozen projects generating electricity for utility use. Still, Lipari acknowledges the not-in-my-backyard opposition.

Ben Lipari:
You have certain folks in the community that would rather you cite the project somewhere else. We spend a lot of time with those community members. We want to hear their concerns.

Steven Potter:
Residents can make their voice heard about these projects.

Meghan Sovey-Lashua:
Throughout the entire review process, there are many opportunities for public participation.

Steven Potter:
Meghan Sovey-Lashua is with the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin, the agency that regulates utilities in the state. She says approving any new energy project is a very deliberate, drawn-out process. Over six months, the agency conducts reviews, holds public hearings.

Meghan Sovey-Lashua:
And then there’ll be an open meeting where the commission then deliberates after reviewing that very full record of evidence. And then the commission makes its decision.

Steven Potter:
One major factor that the PSC considers with new power generation applications is the state’s growing need for more energy. In the PSC’s draft of their new strategic energy assessment for 2026 to 2032, the demand for power jumps more than 40%, and more than 70% of that increase is due to three active data center developments.

Meghan Sovey-Lashua:
If there’s a construction project that a utility needs to build to serve a data center, that would come before the commission. But the commission has no authority over data centers.

Steven Potter:
The report also predicts a significant change in the types of energy production over the next six years. In all, coal power will decline 28%. Natural gas will increase 14%. Wind will increase 6% and solar will increase 11%. Such growth in wind and solar will require more landowners to share and lease land.

Kathy Hass:
Three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Steven Potter:
That’s a decision that Kathy Hass made more than 20 years ago.

Kathy Hass:
I’m turbine number two and there is 41 in the project.

Steven Potter:
Since the early 2000s, she has leased land for one wind turbine to the Cedar Ridge Wind Farm project in the town of Empire. The lease payments she and her neighbors receive has made a difference.

Kathy Hass:
It’s helped a lot of farmers, you know, some of the smaller ones, to be able to hang on to their farms.

Steven Potter:
She says the land needed is minimal.

Kathy Hass:
The wind turbine project, it’s able. You can farm right up to it. All you gave up was just this small piece of land to be able to develop this project and add electricity to the grid.

Steven Potter:
Hass says there was opposition to the project early on, but that’s faded.

Kathy Hass:
Once they realize that these were going to help keep our taxes down, you know, then it was a little bit, you know, just so that everybody was going to benefit somehow. Everybody’s pretty much got used to them up there.

Steven Potter:
Still, for farmers like Tom Wilcox, his opposition is steadfast and represents what he sees is worth protecting.

Tom Wilcox:
You asked earlier if there’s good places for this. Yeah, places where crops don’t grow and people don’t grow.

Steven Potter:
Reporting from Clark County, I’m Steven Potter for “Here & Now.”