Wind power could be a major source of tax revenue, but authorities struggle to convince communities
PIPER CITY, Illinois — In Scott Saffer’s science classroom, kids bake cookies in a kitchen, care for fish, turtles and a snake, and have access to a workshop full of tools. As the gifted enrichment coordinator for the Tri-Point School District, Saffer is living his dream as a teacher, one he knew would require money to achieve.
For a time, because of budget problems in rural Ford County, Illinois, he moved to a nearby school district. But when the wind turbines came to town, Tri-Point had the funding to bring him back without a pay cut. There, he was one of 10 recipients of a prestigious statewide teaching award last year.
“It’s made a huge difference in our budgets,” Saffer said of the nearby wind farm, which came online about five years ago, adding nearly $1 million to his school’s annual operating funds. “Those kinds of numbers are the difference between us being here and us leaving.”
An Associated Press analysis of county tax data in Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska — states with large wind farms or high wind potential — found that wind companies are among the largest taxpayers in many rural communities, with total tax bills sometimes exceeding those of large farms, power plants and other big businesses. While wind tax revenues don’t make up a significant percentage of county budgets, they add up to millions of dollars that some local leaders say have translated into meaningful change. But Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, which tracks local opposition to wind power, finds efforts to block wind projects are “widespread and growing.”
The center’s June report found 395 local restrictions that could effectively block wind or solar projects, a 73% increase from less than a year ago. The local restrictions have made it harder for wind companies to find places to build, even as the U.S. has warned against restrictions. committed to tripling renewable energy by 2030 to contribute to the fight against climate change.
Local officials, school principals, fire chiefs and community college administrators are often among the first to see the economic benefits of wind development in their broader community.
Denny Kingren, the fire chief in Paxton, Illinois, said he didn’t initially have any positive or negative feelings about wind energy development — he just saw them popping up all over Illinois.
About 13 years ago, the money was released: about $40,000 a year since, which has been used to buy new trucks, new equipment and more firefighters on call. “It’s been a real benefit to our fire department,” he said.
This year, Ford County’s roughly 200 wind turbines owe the county $3.8 million, or about 10 percent of the county’s property taxes. The AP’s analysis found that the county’s wind farms are among the county’s four largest taxpayers.
Farmland still contributes far more to the county’s tax base than wind turbines; about 90% of the county is farmland. But wind farms can create an influx of money for local schools: Tri-Point, where Saffer works, receives more than $900,000 from local wind farms each year, accounting for 15 percent of the school district’s revenue from local taxes, according to the district’s superintendent.
Benefits such as growth in local economies “are really measurable in places where there is significant installed wind capacity,” said David Schwegman, an assistant professor at American University and co-author of a 2022 article on wind power installations and economic development.
Farmers who sign wind leases can also continue to farm most of their land while adding extra income. Some of that money ends up being funneled back into the community as expenses. And wind projects create jobs — many temporary or requiring travel, some permanent — offering a new career path for community college students.
Schwegman added, however, that wind energy development doesn’t necessarily change some of the long-term forces affecting rural economies, which have been losing population as people move to cities and suburbs for decades.
In some communities, local tax structures mean that a school district won’t see additional money from wind for years or even decades. In places like Iowa, where there are so-called tax increment financing districts, the county sometimes lends money to a wind developer in order to get a bigger windfall later, said Phuong Nguyen, who studies public finance as an associate professor at the University of Iowa.
The wait is long, but when the projects are done, they could add millions of dollars to school budgets and “everybody will be happy,” Nguyen said. However, he thinks people may be more skeptical in the 20 years before the return on investment. He noted that if Iowa’s tax laws were different, schools could get that money sooner.
Mike Marron, a former Illinois state representative and current CEO of Vermilion Advantage, his county’s economic development arm, says the reality of wind’s benefits became apparent when the money started flowing into the county’s coffers, which were “running a pretty significant budget deficit,” and effectively saved him from having to raise taxes on property owners at the time, about 12 years ago.
But Marron said the resistance from anti-wind groups was so strong and polarizing that it made the topic disappear from the discussion. “As an elected official, I felt constrained by the political reality of not being able to communicate the benefits of this initiative,” he said.
And for those who don’t like them, no investment can replace the visual reminders of wind turbines in a landscape, Schwegman said.
“Renewables are very much community projects,” he said. “The people who tend to be negatively impacted by wind turbines tend to be a very hyperlocal group, whereas the benefits of wind tend to be much more dispersed across broader groups.”
Despite Ford County’s advantages, the local government chose to halt future wind development in 2017 by issuing a moratorium on special-use permits for wind projects and then implementing strict regulations on where turbines can be built. Then, in 2023, the state legislature passed a law that limits counties’ ability to restrict wind and solar projects, effectively invalidating many such local rules. according to the Sabin Center.
Saffer said the local measures were a “community decision,” one that school districts are watching closely, knowing they need the money but can’t intervene.
“If we didn’t have this revenue, we wouldn’t have this district here, these little towns would just cease to be a community,” he said.
But communities are made up of individuals. That’s why Marron thinks good neighbor agreements, which compensate everyone in a given wind development area whether or not they have turbines on their property, make sense.
“You’ll notice a check in the mail sooner than you will that your property tax bills aren’t going up,” Marron said.
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Associated Press writer Joshua A. Bickel contributed to this report from Danville, Ill., and Piper City, Ill. Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.
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