Broadcast April 9, 2008, NPR’s All Things Considered
© 2008 David Baron
From California to New England, wind energy is booming. Consumers and lawmakers are demanding more renewable energy, and the result is an unprecedented growth in wind farms. From a distance, the spinning turbines can seem beautiful, but in some communities, living with them has gotten a bit ugly.
Continuing our series “Shifting Ground,” independent producer David Baron has the story of one family blown apart by the wind.
David Baron: A snow-covered road rises from the Black River Valley onto Tug Hill in Lewis County, New York. This is Yancey Road, home to the Yancey family for generations.
John Yancey: “My parents lived here, and my grandfather lived here.”
Baron: John Yancey has lived here his whole life – he’s 48 – and he’s not pleased with the recent changes in the neighborhood.
John Yancey: “We’ve got nothin’ but windmills.”
Baron: Windmills surround him.
John Yancey: “Let me start here on the north. One, two, three, four, five, six...”
Baron: The turbines are white, sleek, enormous – twenty stories tall, with blades three times longer than a Greyhound bus.
John Yancey: “...forty, forty-one, forty-two, forty-three...”
Baron: Almost 200 turbines sprawl across an area larger than Manhattan. This is the Maple Ridge Wind Farm, the largest wind-power facility in the East. It opened two years ago, and it’s transformed the way this rural area looks and sounds.
John Yancey: “You’ll hear that whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.”
Baron: John Yancey says when the wind comes from the right direction, the sound penetrates his house, his bedroom, his consciousness.
John Yancey: “I don’t sleep.”
Baron: Most of the noise comes from one turbine. It’s just across the street. And what makes it especially upsetting – the turbine is on his father’s land.
John Yancey: “I asked him not to have it installed there, to ask the company to either move it or delete it. But they built it, and now I have to suffer with it.”
Baron: John and a couple of his brothers are angry at their father for allowing seven turbines on his land. One brother, Herb Yancey, grows corn and hay on his father’s farm. He says the wind towers and their access roads have fragmented the land.
Herb Yancey: “And now you have all these little fields with no straight borders on them anyplace. It made farming it a nightmare.”
Baron: Then there’s their brother Gordon. He owns a nearby inn that’s popular with snowmobilers. He used to enjoy an unobstructed view of the Adirondacks. Now he looks out on the wind towers.
Gordon Yancey: “They’ve taken away my peacefulness, my serenity, my ability to walk outside on my property and enjoy the quietness of the morning sun, the quietness of the setting sun.”
Baron: And Gordon barely speaks to his father anymore.
Gordon Yancey: “I feel that he sold the family out.”
Ed Yancey: “My name is Edward Yancey. I was born in 1916.”
Baron: Ed Yancey’s hearing isn’t so good, and when I ask him about the turbines that have divided him from his sons, it’s not clear he understands. But there’s a simple reason he agreed to windmills on his land. He receives lease payments of more than $45,000 a year.
Ed Yancey: “It helps out. Helps pay the taxes.”
Baron: His daughter, Virginia Yancey Lyndaker, sides with her father in this family dispute. She says he would have been foolish not to lease his land for wind towers.
Virginia Yancey Lyndaker: “My theory is, if they’re all going to be around you and you’re going to see them and if you’ve got the property, you might as well partake, because why should you go and say, you know, I’m too important to take money.”
Baron: Money, fairness, a sense that decisions were not made democratically – these are the core issues that explain the Yancey family rift. And it’s a rift that’s split the broader community, too. Many people here like the wind farm – it’s brought jobs and tax dollars. Some consider the turbines beautiful. But resentment has bubbled up because those who have a lot of land and a lot of windmills make a lot of money, while their land-poor neighbors receive next to nothing.
Arleigh Rice: “It has caused friction, family against family or neighbor against neighbor.”
Baron: Arleigh Rice is town supervisor for Lowville, New York, one of the three towns that host the Maple Ridge Wind Farm. Wind projects have now been proposed for other communities in the region, and residents of those towns often seek his advice.
Rice: “When I go other places, I say, ‘Sit down and think how you can benefit everyone.’”
Debbie Yancey: “Okay, well, let’s do this. Why don’t you come up and get a sheet of paper and a marker...’”
Baron: That question – how to make wind power something everyone can benefit from – was put recently to an 8th grade science class at Lowville’s middle school. The teacher: Debbie Yancey, Herb’s wife, Ed’s daughter-in-law. She broke the students into teams.
Debbie Yancey: “We’re talking windmills, guys. Windmills.”
Baron: The students came up with several ideas for improving wind farm development. Among them: require that windmills be set back farther from neighboring homes; hold a town vote on whether to allow the project; and don’t let wind-power companies negotiate deals one-on-one with individual landowners.
Michael Hanno (student): “They gotta do it as a community thing.”
Debbie Yancey: “They have to do it as a community thing.”
Hanno: “It’d make the windmills better.”
Ryan Birchenough (student): “The community would get that money.”
Jeremy Kingsley (student): “And then they could figure out where they wanted to plant them. If someone didn’t want it, it didn’t need to be there. It could go somewhere else.”
Debbie Yancey: “Go somewhere else. Okay, so everybody’s kind of all in it together.”
Birchenough: “It’s a win-win situation.”
Debbie Yancey: “A win-win situation.”
Baron: But wind power does involve tradeoffs, and they’re not always easy. How do you weigh the potential harm to neighbors against the benefit to the planet? Is it worth giving up the view you’re used to in exchange for economic gains? Such questions don’t just divide communities and families; they sometimes leave individuals internally conflicted. John Yancey, who’s so upset about the windmill across the street that keeps him up nights? He’s a union electrician. He helped build the wind towers.
John Yancey: “They needed manpower, and our union supplied it.”
Baron: “Did you work on the ones on your dad’s land?”
John Yancey: “Yes, I did. I thought that it possibly would be something that I’d be proud to say that, ‘Yes, I helped build this turbine across the road.’ But now I’m eating my words.”
Baron: And now that the windmills have come, John Yancey says he may go, and leave his home on Yancey Road.
For NPR News, I’m David Baron.
