In Wisconsin, tilting at windmills is a serious matter

Dairy farmer Dennis Oechsner cocks his head and squints upward as 200 Canada geese pass overhead on a brilliant spring afternoon. Across the fields, flocks in ragged Vs mark the start of a migration that will bring hundreds of thousands of geese through the area before summer.

Birds, including threatened and endangered species, are at the center of a dispute over a $250 million wind-turbine complex that a Chicago company wants to build in east central Wisconsin. Invenergy Wind LLC hopes to erect 133 turbines, each standing 389 feet tall, across 50 square miles of farmland just east of Horicon Marsh, a federal and state wildlife refuge described by bird experts as one of the largest and most important wetlands in the Midwest.

Many farmers have embraced the plan. Scores would profit from turbines on their land, including Mr. Oechsner, who, together with his father and brother, would earn $46,200 from 11 turbines on the 750 acres they own in common. But others say the turbines will harm the birds that descend upon the marsh each spring and fall.

"I’m not anti-wind energy," says Joe Breaden, a high school biology teacher who heads Horicon Marsh System Advocates, a group fighting the plan. "I’m anti-location. You’ve got to be a little scrambled in the head to put 133 400-foot tall egg beaters next to a place where hundreds of thousands of birds come in."

By Richard Mertens | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Full Story: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0425/p01s02-ussc.html?s=hns