It's an ordinary day on Pete Ferrell's 7,000-acre ranch in the Flint Hills of southeastern Kansas. Meaning, it's really windy. When he drives his silver Toyota Tundra out of the canyon where the ranch buildings nestle, the truck rocks from the gusts. Up on top of a ridge, surrounded by a sweeping vista of low hills, rippling grass, and towering wind turbines that make you feel like a mouse scampering underfoot, Ferrell carefully navigates into a spot where the wind won't damage the doors when they're opened. Then he points to an old-style windmill, used for pumping water, which was erected by his father decades earlier when the ranch was in the throes of a drought. "That's the windmill that saved us in the '30s," he explains, his voice growing husky with emotion.
Ferrell, 55, is a fourth-generation Kansan who looks the part. He's slim with gray hair, squint-lines, and a cowboy hat. His great-grandfather established Ferrell Ranch on the high plains east of Wichita in 1888, and it has nearly failed several times over the years. Ferrell has held the place together through cattle grazing, oil wells, and, now, wind. He owns the land under 50 of the 100 turbines of the Elk River Wind Project, a 150-megawatt wind farm that opened in 2005.
Ferrell is one of the fathers of Kansas wind farming. He ran through three different developers before getting the operation going on his land. There was stiff opposition to wind farming in the Flint Hills from preservationists concerned about marring the landscape and from politicians tied to the coal industry, but, finally, Ferrell had his way. He now travels the state as an evangelist. "He has been a great spokesman for wind in Kansas," says Mark Lawlor, project manager in the state for Horizon Wind Energy, a wind farm developer. "He has lived off the land, and he's found something new he can tap into."
For centuries, the wind has been the enemy of the farmer. It blows away soil, dries out crops, and the howling makes some people crazy. So it's a twist of fate that wind is now emerging as an ally. Some call the vast American prairie the Saudi Arabia of wind, capable of producing enough electricity to meet the entire country's needs—assuming there's the will to harness it.
Wind power, while still just a speck in America's total energy mix, is no longer some fantasy of the Birkenstock set. In the U.S., more than 25,000 turbines produce 17 gigawatts of electricity-generating capacity, enough to power 4.5 million homes. Total capacity rose 45% last year and is forecast to nearly triple by 2012. Right now, only 1% of the country's electricity comes from wind, but government and industry leaders want to see that share hit 20% by 2030, both to boost the supply of carbon-free energy and to create green-collar jobs.
Such a transformation won't come easily. While much of America's wind energy is in the Midwest, demand for electricity is on the coasts. And the electrical grid, designed decades ago, can't move large quantities of electricity thousands of miles. There's plenty of wind off the coasts, but it's both expensive to harness and controversial; not-in-my-backyard sentiment has slowed some of the most high-profile projects.
Kansas, in the middle of the wind belt, has become a battleground for the wind revolution. Advocates of alternative energy are pitted against defenders of the status quo, which in Kansas means coal. The flash point: a proposal by Sunflower Electric Power to build two 700-megawatt, coal-fired power plants in western Kansas. State regulators denied permits on the basis of CO2 emissions, the Republican-controlled legislature passed bills to overturn the ruling, Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius vetoed the bills, and the legislature has narrowly sustained her vetoes. So ferocious is this fight that Sunflower and its allies placed ads in newspapers suggesting that because Sebelius is against their coal project she's playing into the hands of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The poisoned atmosphere helps explain why Kansas has only 364megawatts of wind power capacity from about 300 turbines, despite having some of the hardest-blowing wind in the country, while Texas produces more than 10 times as much.
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