A shot from April:

Now, imagine that same piece of ground...

with 600 wind turbines on it. And a road going to each and every turbine.

Yeah. Really.

One of the projects to cross my desk this past month is a huge new powerline. Designed to take energy produced in our state to California.

Most of it will be "green" energy, which is quite the fad these days. Most of that coming from wind farms far from here. But federal folks now tell me they have received applications for over 30 new wind farms in our part of the state.

The only thing holding these projects back is: a powerline to get the electricity to market.

Once this new line is in, Katie bar the door.

Now, mind you, they are not putting these projects in the gas, oil and uranium fields. Oh, no. Nor along highways. Every one of these suckers (That they can tell us about... there is something with this Administration that requires public employees to keep companies' plans secret until the companies decide otherwise. "Proprietary information", you see.)... but everyone one of these is out in remote, undisturbed, pristine country. Places that will be changed forever by a network of roads accessing every 100 square meters.

Including one proposed on a wilderness boundary.

Not to mention great sage grouse habitats. And we already know that sage grouse avoid tall structures as if they were sniper nests.

Which to them, they are. And by "avoid", I mean by approximately a kilometer.

That's two-thirds of a mile for you Americans. A radius 0.65 miles wide of lost habitat around every wind turbine.

While these turbines may be "green", they are not benign.

My question is... why are we doing this? There are literally thousands of square miles of developed land with high winds where we could put these turbines and not lose a single grouse. Not destroy a single wilderness, or single natural area.

We call it the Great Plains.

Look at that satellite image I snagged off Google up there. I just clicked on anywhere in Nebraska and zoomed in. And found just what I expected to find.

Crop circles. The circular fields watered by rotating irrigation systems. And every one of those circles (each of which is filling a quarter of a square mile) leaves four corners of unirrigated, unplanted land.

Imagine what we could generate if even a fourth of those corners had a wind turbine on them. No problem with roads, 'cause the road system is already there. No problems with avoidance by wildlife, 'cause it's cropland. If critters avoid the fields, farmers would consider that a good thing.

No new huge powerline network, either. I've never been there, but would just about guarantee almost every county road you see already has a powerline alongside it.

The best thing?

Who would get revenue off a wind power grid in the farmland?

Farmers.

Why worry about tax-funded crop supports when they can get all the extra revenue they need to keep the farm by selling us electricity too?

Not to mention the added security. Put hundreds of turbines together on a single line and substation, and a single terrorist or tornado can do real damage. Spread your power sources and lines out in a grid, and there is less to lose in any one spot.

So. Why isn't this happening, you might ask yourselves?

Simple.

Building big, huge wind farm projects on public lands takes a lot of capital. The only ones capable of doing it are...

The big rich energy companies. And they get to keep being big, rich energy companies. Using our public lands, and federal tax breaks.

Whereas with a farmland wind power project, the energy company would have to share profits with hundreds and hundreds of farmers.

Speaking as one of the rest of us...

How is that a bad thing?