Windmills split town and families

'Good neighbor'
But Byer, who is John Yancey's uncle, understands the lingering resentments the windmills fuel. The wind company signed lease agreements with just 74 landowners over a 12-mile stretch and "good neighbor" agreements with several dozen more, offering $500 to $1,000 for the inconvenience of living close to the turbines. In a small community, that kind of money can cause tensions between those who profit and those who don't.

Byer also understands the strain windmills can place on a family. His 47-year-old son, Rick, lives higher up on the plateau in a small white ranch house with a two-seat glider parked in a shed. The glider is Rick Byer's passion. He flies on weekends when he's not working at the pallet-making company.

In order to launch, the glider has to be towed by truck down a long rolling meadow across the road. When the wind company began negotiating with his father to put turbines on his "runway," Rick Byer delivered a furious ultimatum.

"I told him if he allowed turbines in that field he would lose a son."

A son's rage
The son's rage won out over the father's desire for easy cash, but Rick Byer still seethes at the forest of turbines that sprouted across from his home. Now he speaks out in other area towns where windmills are proposed.

"I tell people it's not a wind farm, it's an industrial development," he says as he mends wooden pallets in a barn one warm summer night. Rock music crackles from a radio propped crookedly on a pile of wood. Every now and then, Byer adjusts the set for a better reception. The windmills interfere with the signal, he says. They interfere with television too.

And they transform the night. As dusk falls, red strobe lights appear on every third windmill, glowing eerily atop the blades spinning ghostlike in the moonlight.

Like most of their neighbors, the Yanceys and Byers had a hard time believing the wind salesman when he first rolled into town in 1999. Years earlier there had been talk of natural gas on Tug Hill, but nothing ever came of it. People assumed the wind project would go the same way.

"No one thought it would happen," John Yancey says.

'Going to change the landscape'
But Bill Moore, a Maryland-based energy consultant and investor who worked on Wall Street before going out on his own, was persistent. And persuasive. For several years he drove all over Tug Hill in his Land Rover, knocking on doors, talking to farmers in fields, hosting meetings at the Elks Lodge, preaching the gospel of wind.

At first local officials were skeptical, too. But they listened, and learned, and they started hammering out agreements with Moore's company, Atlantic Renewable Corp., and its partner company, Zilka Renewable Engergy. (The companies have changed names and ownership several times and the Maple Ridge Wind project is now jointly owned by PPM Energy of Portland, Ore., which is part of the Spanish company Iberdrola SA, and Houston-based Horizon Wind Energy LLC, which is owned by the Portuguese conglomerate Energias de Portugal.)

Eventually officials from Lowville, Martinsburg and Harrisburg, along with Lewis County legislators, negotiated a 15-year payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreement that gave the three jurisdictions $8.1 million in the first year.

"We knew we were going to change the landscape, maybe forever," says Martinsburg supervisor Terry Thiesse. "We knew some people would be unhappy. But the benefits far outweighed the objections of a few."

Martinsburg, with a population of 1,249, got the biggest municipal cut because it hosts the largest number of windmills — a total of 102. Thiesse, who receives payments for a windmill on his own land, says Martinsburg's budget went from just under $400,000 to more than $1.2 million with the first wind payment in 2006. The municipality is currently negotiating a deal with another wind company for an additional 39 turbines.

In Lowville, school Superintendent Ken McAuliffe is thrilled to be buying new computers, expanding school buildings and planning new athletic fields. The school district, which serves all jurisdictions, received $2.8 million in 2006 and $3.5 million in 2007.

Great source of confusion
Still, McAuliffe said, negotiating the deal was the most demanding experience of his professional life.

"I'm an educator, not a wind expert or an investor," McAuliffe said. The hardest part, he said, was understanding the amounts of money involved, trusting that the community would get it, and "the great unknown, which is how much the wind company is making."

Wind finances are a source of great confusion for many locals, who assumed they would get free electricity once the turbines were installed. In fact, the energy is sold to utility companies and then piped into the grid.

Though the wind itself is free, companies have enormous startup costs: a single industrial wind turbine costs about $3 million. In New York, companies benefit from the fact that the state requires 25 percent of all electricity to be supplied from renewable sources by 2013. They also get federal production tax credits in addition to "green" renewable energy credits, which can be sold in the energy market.

In this context, the annual payments of about $6,600 per turbine are relatively small. But for some cash-strapped farmers, they amount to a retirement supplement.

"It's the best cash cow we ever had," booms retired dairy farmer Bill Burke, who has six turbines on his land. "This cow doesn't need to be fed, doesn't need a vet, doesn't need a place to lie down."

Burke, a blustery 60-year-old, is proud of his credentials as the wind company's biggest local cheerleader. A school board member and county legislator, he also works part-time for the company, giving lectures and tours. His son, Bobby, works for it full-time.

Burke sold the last of his herd in 2004. Without the income from the turbines, he says, he might have had to sell his 100-year-old farm too. He has no regrets about grabbing his "once in a lifetime chance at prosperity."

"This project was happening, like it or not, and you would have to be a fool not to participate, to be excited and take advantage of it," Burke says.

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