By CHUCK OFFENBURGER
JEFFERSON, Iowa, Sept. 9, 2024 – Back in 2006, days after the Hardin Hilltop Wind Farm north of town had been dedicated as Greene County’s first wind energy project, Father Bill Brunner began his sermon at St. Joseph Catholic Church talking about the new development.
“Have you seen those seven wind turbines out there?” he asked the congregation. “I’m calling them ‘The Seven Prophets.’ They’re a sign that the winds of change are blowing through Greene County.”
Indeed, change in energy production was happening here, and across much of Iowa. And it still is.
Tom Wind, a Greene County farmer and a leading wind energy consultant, was involved in that first project here, with six other farmers. By now he has worked on 40 or more wind power developments of various sizes across Iowa and beyond. On Friday, he shared his wind energy experience and expertise with members and guests of the Greene County Historical Society, meeting at historic St. Patrick Church near Cedar Creek in the northwest corner of the county.
Tom Wind, speaking on wind power in a historic church west of Churdan, Iowa.
“Today, there are about 7,000 large wind turbines in Iowa, and they are producing more than 60 percent of the electricity we use across the state,” Wind said. “I never thought it would happen this quickly.”
Now it’s not only the cleanest form of energy publicly available, but it’s also the most economical for consumers who can get it.
“Wind power has saved electrical consumers in the upper Midwest millions of dollars, maybe billions,” he said.
Who foresaw a time when a giant corporation like Google, Inc., would seek out wind farm developers in places like Greene County, Iowa, wanting to become a partner? Who thought a public utility like MidAmerican Energy would invest millions in a place like Greene County to put up and operate more than 80 wind turbines?
That has indeed happened. In fact, there are now 158 large wind turbines producing electricity in Greene County.
And Tom Wind feels fortunate that this ancient form of energy was harnessed for public consumption at the time when he was building his own career.
“And why did I get involved?” he continued, breaking into a broad smile for his crowd on Friday. “I just happened to have the right last name.”
He enjoys calling himself “a windy guy.”
A farm kid who grew up between the towns of Cooper and Jamaica, he graduated from Jefferson High School in 1969 and went on to Iowa State University where he earned a degree in electrical engineering. From 1974 to 1989, he worked as an engineer for Iowa Southern Utilities based in the southern Iowa town of Centerville.
“The first contact I had with wind power was in 1985,” Wind said. “That’s when in the town of Sigourney, Iowa, a wind turbine was installed by one homeowner. I was sent by my boss up to Sigourney to see if having that homeowner operating his wind turbine would be any kind of a problem for a utility company like ours.”
He didn’t think that one wind turbine seemed like much of an economic threat to the utility company, but he also realized he was seeing what might be the future.
Within five years, he’d left Iowa Southern to start his own consulting business helping other utilities plan for that future. One of the companies he began working with was Waverly Light and Power in that northeast Iowa town.
“I was talking one day to Glenn Cannon, the manager there, about how it looked like wind energy could become really important,” Wind said. “Glenn agreed and was the first person who said me, ‘You’re missing your calling by not being involved in that, with the last name of Wind.’ It was like he gave me a cheer: ‘Go wind! ‘Go wind!’ ”
He said the two “energy crises” of the 1970s – when the U.S. government and American corporations learned how dependent they were on fossil fuels from the turbulent Middle East – inspired moves to make our nation more energy independent. That created a demand for not only increased oil production in the U.S., but also for alternative energy forms, like wind power.
A typical view today south of Grand Junction, Iowa.
Wind said he’s always been proud that his home state of Iowa was an early adaptor.
He said that during the energy crises of the 1970s, the state opened an energy office to begin considering renewable energy options. In the 1980s, the state legislature began considering and approving incentives for companies, cooperatives and communities to explore wind, solar, hydro, natural gas and nuclear power – in addition to incenting ethanol and biodiesel fuel production and finding ways to clean-up coal power.
Two Iowa legislators who “were so visionary” and important in the new push for cleaner, cheaper and more reliable energy were Ralph Rosenberg and David Osterberg.
Even the Iowa Farm Bureau was supportive.
Tom Wind says besides the major players in the renewable energy movement in Iowa, there were some smaller advances that were also very important. He’s referring to small wind energy installations that other visionaries made happen – and demonstrated to the general public how environmentally and economically desirable renewable energy can be. Like?
–The Spirit Lake Schools in northwest Iowa, which installed a wind turbine in 1992 to provide the electrical power to their facilities. It paid for itself in seven years and lasted 20 years.
–Ditto on a project at the school in little Royal, also in northwest Iowa.
–The owner of the Boondocks USA interstate highway rest stop between Williams and Blairsburg in north central Iowa put up a wind turbine to power their motel, gas station and restaurant.
–In the central Iowa town of Nevada, two wind turbines were installed and for years they powered the local schools and hospital.
Then came the gradual growth of the windfarms.
In the fall of 1999, what was then “the largest windfarm in the world” was dedicated northwest of Storm Lake around the towns of Alta and Aurelia. There were eventually 251 turbines there. Most of the turbine towers back then were about 165 feet tall.
Today, most of the 7,000 large wind turbines built and operating in Iowa are more like 325 feet tall. The huge blades weigh about 12,000 pounds each. The “nacelle” up top housing the electrical generating equipment, weighs about 50,000 pounds and is large enough it could hold a pick-up truck.
And while it may appear from a distance that those big blades are turning so slowly in the wind, they are actually moving at about 150 miles per hour at the far tip!
Meanwhile, farmers who lease strips of land so wind turbines can be constructed and receiving payments as high as $10,000 per year per turbine.
It’s an amazing industry that we’ve watched grow up around us in most of Iowa.
“A windy guy.”
Tom Wind, who is now 72, clearly has great satisfaction in having been part of it.
He’s still involved, as I’ve said, but today he’s spending as much or more of his time experimenting in and practicing “regenerative agriculture” on the 160-acre home farm he and his wife Sue Wind took over in the 1990s. They had an old house on it for years, but in 2006, completed a beautiful new home – also their consulting company headquarters – which is probably the most energy-efficient home in Greene County.
“When we got back on the farm, I was shocked to realize how depleted the topsoil was,” Tom Wind told me. It was the result of years of over-production, over-use of chemicals, not having any livestock and other practices of industrial agriculture in our modern era.
He refigured how he wanted to run the farm, moving forward. Today he operates it “mostly organic,” with careful crop and pasture rotation, and a variety of livestock.
What’s he learned? “That you can really improve even degraded soils, and that you can see the benefit of that in your crop production,” he said. “And you see it in all the earthworms you’ll have in your soil again – the variety of plants you’ll see growing, the return of the insects and birds, the increase in pheasants and quail on our land. It’s a much more natural process.”
The Winds are terrific citizens, always involved in activities in Cooper, Jefferson, across the county and beyond.
Which reminds me of a favorite moment back in 2006, when Cooper was celebrating its quasquicentennial, and a bunch of us in the area were involved with a weekend festival. One event was a “Meet Our Ancestors” tour of the Franklin Township Cemetery, where people costumed up and portrayed earlier community leaders.
Tom Wind was portraying James Schilling, his maternal grandfather who preceded him by two generations on the Wind farm of today. Tom wore a pair of work boots, blue bibbed overalls and a straw hat as he told the story of the Schillings and Winds. When I stopped by to take some photos of him at the gravesite, he confided in me he was embarrassed. Why?
“When I was planning what I’d do out here, I immediately thought I needed to be wearing bibbed overalls,” he said. “My grandpa always wore them. Most farmers did back then. So, I started looking around home, and I realized I didn’t have a single pair of bibbed overalls. How embarrassing is that? What kind of Iowa farmer wouldn’t have even one pair of well-worn bibbed overalls? I had to go to town and buy a pair.”
He’s “a windy guy,” all right, but one with strong roots.
—
You can comment on this column below or write the columnist directly by email at chuck@offenburger.com.
