Nuclear and Renewables

So, to continue my thoughts on Nuclear and Renewables, pros and cons, I don't have an organized plan. Having done a few posts on nuclear, I want to switch to wind energy, and start with some cons. To date, most wind energy development in Iowa has been done by large absentee owned corporations. Most of the net profits leave the rural areas, leaving only property tax revenue, and annual lease payments to land owners. Many of those land owners are also absentee. Development has been done mainly at the industrial scale. Industrial is a word frequently used to criticize farming in Iowa by folks with connections to the environmental community, though most of these same folks remain silent or even actively promote industrial wind here in Iowa.

thoughts about Eminent domain - I'm always against private companies having eminent domain capability. I mention it here, because I think a lot of the environmental groups fighting the proposed ethanol - carbon pipline (eminent domain use) development proposed here, would quickly contradict themselves if, say, a private comapny wanted to use eminent domain to site a transmission line to expand industrial scale wind energy in the state. Note - I'll be posting about ethanol and carbon sequestration in the future.

So, having touched on the money flow out of the rural areas with wind, Let's talk more about if the revenue that stays (property taxes) is properly assessed. I've compiled a long list of instances in my featured post that causes me to think it may not be (midamerican or any other developer mentioned there is welcome to discuss this with me, and I'll happily correct - update the post if I've made an error).

The other local revenue that can stay local is annual lease payments for siting wind turbines on farm land. However 53% of Iowa land is not owned by the people that farm it , so it's safe to say all that annual lease income is certainly not retained locally as well. The other issue with annual lease payments, is that I'm guessing leases signed a decade ago (or more) have not kept up with inflation. Area farm news broadcaster Duane Murley, was interviewing an Iowa farm land auctioneer ( can't recall who) a few months ago. The auctioneer mentioned annual leases for wind turbines are as high as $20,000 per year, with one haveing an escalator that would eventually increase the annual wind lease payment to $36,000 per year. Check with Duane if you want more details. I'm guessing a lot of wind lease receipients might be disappointed with the income they are receiving for older wind leases in Iowa. Here I should mention that I hope that farmers receiving annual payments for carbon sequestration haven't entered into long term leases for for those programs (post on that topic coming as well).

edit - so the format won't let me keep this from displaying as a long run on sentence , so I'm adding some images to break it up a bit. The explanation for the pictures is in the featured post.