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GARDNER, Kansas − Donna Knoche made her approach as much as the rostrum on the Johnson County Fee listening to on June 6, 2022, her new yellow shirt crisp and her voice regular. It wasn’t one thing she’d ever thought she’d should do in her 93 years within the place her grandfather first homesteaded within the 1860s.
Calmly setting apart her walker, she regarded on the county commissioners arrayed to her left and commenced to talk.
“I by no means in all my life thought I might arise right here to guard our property rights by having the ability to use our land legally for the perfect advantage of our household,” she mentioned.
Scores of people were in line behind her. Lots of them had different concepts.
Some implored the commissioners to vote to permit the so-called West Gardner plan, a utility-size array of photo voltaic panels, saying the county wanted to commit to wash vitality for his or her kids’s future.
However others have been simply as passionately opposed. Many wore matching T-shirts that implored the council to “Cease INDUSTRIAL SOLAR,” testifying for greater than three hours towards the plan for Knoche’s farm and others throughout the county.
To them, the photo voltaic plant would “threaten health and well-being” and didn’t match “the character of the land.” It might create “a panorama of black glass and towering windmills,” that will put lives in danger and trigger “a mass exodus out of the world.”
The struggle performed out in entrance of 1 small county fee in a single 613,000-person county. However at its coronary heart, this struggle – and tons of of others prefer it throughout the nation – was over the way forward for the entire nation’s vitality provide and, maybe, the way forward for the planet.
Because the nation races to shift to carbon-free vitality to forestall local weather change, opposition actions have popped up nationwide to struggle new photo voltaic and wind farms, hampering America’s probabilities of assembly its climate pledges.
A USA TODAY analysis of local rules and policies nationwide discovered that, as of December, 15% of counties in the USA had banned or otherwise blocked new utility-scale wind farms, photo voltaic installations or each.
Previously decade, 183 U.S. counties had their first wind tasks begin producing energy, whereas practically 375 blocked new wind generators. In 2023, nearly as many counties blocked new photo voltaic tasks as added them.
The explanations for native opposition are diversified and the motives behind them might be murky however usually boil down to 1 important concept: Renewables are wonderful, however we don’t need them right here.
That’s an issue, mentioned Grace Wu, a professor on the College of California, Santa Barbara, who research vitality techniques and land use change. “If nowhere appears to be the suitable place, more and more we’ll have a more durable and more durable time to web site them.”
The land owned by the Knoche household is only one spot in a statewide struggle in Kansas, which has each the nation’s fourth best wind resources and, as solar energy know-how has change into extra environment friendly, strong solar as nicely: the identical daylight that drives photosynthesis in large-scale crops like corn can generate vitality in photo voltaic panels.
At present, the state will get 47.13% of its electrical energy from wind and 0.33% from photo voltaic.
But now, 14 of the 105 counties in Kansas block wind generators and 12 block photo voltaic farms. These embody outright bans, top restrictions, unworkable setbacks for generators, measurement limitations for photo voltaic farms, caps on the quantity of agricultural land that can be utilized and, in McPherson County, an “indefinite moratorium” on photo voltaic functions.
These efforts mirror these in tons of of counties and townships throughout the nation, the place the merest trace of a possible undertaking shortly brings forth a Fb group, yard indicators, organized protests and – more and more – zoning guidelines and legal guidelines that make new renewable vitality inconceivable to construct.
Seen as only one flare-up in a nationwide pattern to oppose native green-energy tasks, the struggle in Johnson County shouldn’t be shocking.
However to Donna Knoche, 93, and her husband Robert “Doc” Knoche, 95, it’s bewildering – and annoying.
For them, leasing acres to a photo voltaic farm would simplify their land’s care, maintain it accessible for farming when the lease runs out and permit it to proceed to be handed on by means of the generations.
“We figured it was simply a kind of kinds of issues that you could possibly do – like shopping for a home or leasing a automobile. You possibly can simply do it by yourself and never should take care of all this complexity,” Donna mentioned.
As an alternative, it has change into a five-year battle.
“I had no concept it will drag on this lengthy,” mentioned Doc.
Deep roots in Kansas
Both Donna and Doc have deep roots in this land.
Donna’s grandfather William Brecheisen came to the United States in 1850 as a 7-year-old. His German-speaking family was from Alsace–Lorraine, at that time part of France.
“They got the Kansas Fever,” she said. “They came out in a prairie schooner wagon,” she said.
William served in the Union Army during the Civil War and then came home to Kansas, where he homesteaded 160 acres of the flat, productive plains.
“We have the patent from 1868,” Donna said proudly from her well-worn chair next to her husband’s matching one in the living room of their simple rambler in Gardner, Kansas. They’ve lived here since 1959. It’s where they raised their six children.
Robert is universally known as Doc after working more than 60 years as a large animal veterinarian in the area – he still has his license. He grew up in the town of Paola. After the death of his mother he was raised on his uncle and aunt’s farm. At the time, they worked the land not with machines but with half a dozen horses – “and two mules,” he said.
Too young to serve in World War II, he had to wait several years to start veterinary school because all the slots were reserved for veterans.
He graduated in 1952 and settled in Gardner, a town of 650 at the time.
He roomed with a local woman who took in boarders, and went on dates with a few girls in town. “I never asked for a second date,” he says. Then his landlady’s daughter had a baby at the new hospital in Gardner and Robert met a nurse who had just been hired there – Donna.
Their first date was on July 12, 1952, “to a picture show in Ottawa” about 25 miles away. They drove in Doc’s 1951 Ford.
Today when they tell this story, the couple look at each other – their matching chairs side by side – and smile.
“We’ve been married for 70 years,” Donna said.
“So that’s how it all worked out,” Doc said.
Those 160 acres that Donna’s grandfather had farmed grew as the family bought up additional land.
Today that legacy is about 1,190 acres of farmland that straddles Johnson and Douglas counties. For many years, the Knoches rented out most of the ground to Donna’s uncle Lucky Brecheisen, who grew corn, soybeans and hay. After he died in 1997 they took over, eventually running a 200-head cow-calf operation in addition to the veterinary practice.
“We bought some land south of Gardner and we had mostly Angus cattle of our own,” Doc said. “I built the fences and mowed the hay. Mom would answer the phone when people called for emergencies.”
“It wasn’t easy, it was long hours,” Doc says of the 10-year stint. Shoulder surgery around 2010 forced him to give up his herd. Since then, they’ve rented the land to other farmers and ranchers.
Doc doesn’t call himself a farmer, but he knows the soil is not as fertile as it is elsewhere. “Lucky always said, ‘We’ve got all bottom land – because the top land is all washed away.’ So it’s not the good prime ground you think of,” Doc said.
Keeping the land healthy and productive is important to the family. “We’ve worked to conserve the soil and make it better through the years,” said Donna.
In time, they realized they would never farm the whole property, and no one person in their family was likely to, either. That led to a conundrum.
The Knoches have six children, 11 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren. As they approached their 90s, they’d wrestled with how to divide the 1,190 acres among all those heirs.
They had a plan for sharing, but then a better one came up. In 2018, they came home to a message on their answering machine.
The caller was from a solar developer looking to lease land in the area for a solar farm.
“Well, I called him back and we talked about it,” Doc said, “and it sounded better than farming.” It didn’t hurt that one of their sons-in-law, Steve Clark, was an engineer and solar consultant, so they had an expert to talk with.
The Knoches ended up signing a four-year lease on their land with NextEra Energy, as did other landowners and farmers nearby.
The deal gave the company an option to build on the land. The Knoches got a little bit of money for the agreement, and for a while, nothing else happened. “We didn’t make a big show of it,” Donna said.
They figured it would take a long time for an energy plant to be developed, if ever.
They’d heard stories about windmills in other places, and how people fought them. This seemed different. A solar farm would keep the rural land from being built up as something else – a subdivision, or a warehouse. The panels lasted a long time, up to 30 years, but after that, they could be removed and the land could be farmed again, if people wanted.
They didn’t think about it much for the next few years.
“I really hadn’t heard much about people fighting solar,” Doc said. Then he looked over at his wife, something between a smile and a grimace on his face.
“So we found out about it,” he said.
The opposition to solar
The planned solar farm – the West Gardner Solar Project – was initially proposed to incorporate as a lot as 3,000 acres unfold over Douglas and Johnson counties that will generate as much as 320 megawatts of electrical energy. The undertaking would additionally embody 129 megawatts of battery storage, to make the photo voltaic vitality accessible when the solar isn’t shining.
Then issues received contentious.
Folks heard in regards to the leases and commenced to prepare towards the proposed photo voltaic farm. A Fb group opposing the undertaking appeared, a number of teams have been fashioned and a website was created.
Quickly there have been hearings scheduled earlier than the Johnson County commissioners, who have been contemplating varied proposals amending the zoning rules for photo voltaic amenities and battery storage.
There have been work periods. Planning fee conferences. Subcommittee conferences. The work stretched for greater than a 12 months.
Crowds of opponents flocked to public conferences to demand the plans for a photo voltaic farm be shut down.
The household estimates between the 2 counties they’ve attended greater than a dozen conferences, not together with those they’ve watched on-line.
Lastly, June 2022 arrived. The purpose on this heat summer season evening was to vote on precisely what the county would permit. How giant may the photo voltaic installations be? How far should they be from cities? What about stormwater runoff? How a lot of a buffer ought to there be from the land of different neighbors who weren’t a part of the undertaking? What number of years would permits be legitimate?
Even when county commissioners allowed photo voltaic tasks, there would nonetheless be different hurdles.
Opponents decried what they name industrial wind and photo voltaic and mentioned the installations haven’t any place in an idyllic panorama of corn, wheat, soybeans and cattle.
They mentioned photo voltaic panels would drip poisonous chemical compounds from their glass into the bottom, contaminating wells. The land below them would warmth up and kill all surrounding vegetation. The photo voltaic cells and batteries deliberate to accompany them can be in danger for catastrophic fires that nation firefighters can be unable to include. Property values would fall and a lot of the land can be consumed that the nation would threat ravenous.
These Johnson County conferences aired lots of the similar considerations that emerged nationwide, in additional than a dozen totally different native zoning conferences reviewed on-line or in individual by USA TODAY.
The issue with these considerations is that almost none of them are true.
“That they had these conferences they usually have been very damaging,” mentioned Karlene Thomson, one of many Knoches’ daughters. “Loads of misinformation received put out.”
The meeting on June 6, 2022, lasted more than three hours.
It began with a solemn recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. Then speaker after speaker came forward. There were many in favor of the project, but most were adamantly – though politely – opposed.
To them the solar farm was an intrusion of industrial energy production that would destroy the rural community that they loved.
Not that the area hadn’t long been home to more than farms. The 9,000 acre Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant was constructed there in 1942, using greater than 15,000 individuals on the top of World Struggle II. In 2013, BNSF Railway opened an intermodal shipping hub within the southern a part of the county. The 330-acre I-35 Logistics Park opened the identical 12 months. Panasonic broke floor on a brand new battery plant on the previous ammunition plant in 2022.
And other people from close by Olathe, Overland Park and even Kansas Metropolis stored shifting deeper into the county, shopping for small 5- and 10-acre plots to construct their dream properties on.
However hundreds of acres of photo voltaic panels was one thing nobody had ever skilled, they usually didn’t prefer it.
“That is up to now off from being proper, I do not even have phrases. You may be affecting over 200 householders and 1,200 souls with one undertaking,” mentioned Lisa Huppe of close by Edgerton, Kansas.
“We aren’t towards photo voltaic vitality. Nevertheless, relating to utility scale amenities within the agricultural communities of rural Johnson County, it’s the mistaken alternative,” she mentioned. “If you happen to permit this to occur, commissioners, you’ll devalue the property and destroy the lives that we’ve got spent years constructing right here and threaten our well being and well-being.”
Many opponents sported T-shirts that learn “County Commissioners: Defend our High quality of Life. Allow us to enable you draft rules that cease INDUSTRIAL SOLAR.”
“We stand to lose the character of our communities, with a transition from agricultural to industrial use,” said Pam Ferguson of Eudora. “Developers want you to think that we need to turn our state into a landscape of black glass and towering windmills. And if you do so, the planet will be ruined.”
Solar and wind power need to be sited responsibly, away from places like Johnson County which have lots of people in them, said Carrie Brandon, chairperson for Douglas County/Johnson County Kansans for Responsible Solar.
“We notice that renewable vitality is required to offset oil and coal,” she mentioned. “However we’ve got good individuals on our planet who’re continuously developing with new vitality innovations. Haste makes for waste – we might be good about it and never simply go all in on blanketing rural areas and taking agricultural land out of our stock.”
Brandon says her work to struggle the undertaking has taken a toll on her well being and her enterprise. “I’ve spent a minimum of half one million {dollars} at my hourly charge, it’s been an infinite effort during the last three years,” she mentioned.
For the Knoches, the desire to farm the sun on their land is a simple matter of property rights. They and other landowners want to maximize the profit they make from their fields without having to sell it off or break it up. It’s their land. They should use it as they see fit.
“This opposition doesn’t seem to be concerned about property rights for anybody but themselves,” said Donna.
Of course, zoning restrictions are nothing new. The Knoches think the solar panels – not very tall, silent, no smoke or different emissions – make for a greater slot in farm nation than nearly anything that may get constructed.
However the household can also’t assist however see it as a matter of seniority. In any case, this has been their land for the higher a part of two centuries.
Doc does permit that issues began to vary even within the Nineteen Fifties. Folks moved out of town to small farms for the ambiance.
Again in these days they have been known as agriculturalists.
“There was a narrative in regards to the distinction between a farmer and an agriculturalist,” he mentioned. “A farmer makes cash on the farm and spends it on the town. An agriculturalist makes cash on the town and comes out and buys a farm and spends it on his farm,” Doc mentioned.
Again then, the spreads individuals purchased have been perhaps 160 acres, he mentioned. Folks really farmed. At present the lot sizes of these looking for a rural way of life are so much smaller, usually as little as 5 acres, mentioned their daughter Jane Knoche.
“Their huge assertion is that they got here out to the agricultural peace and quiet of the agricultural space,” she mentioned.
The problem has been divisive sufficient that it’s made the county a much less neighborly place. On a drive to go to the land the place the photo voltaic farm can be constructed, Jane identified signal after signal on fenceposts and in storefronts studying “No Industrial Photo voltaic” and “Defend our High quality of Life.”
“Not so enjoyable to see,” Jane mentioned.
Doc, who loves airplanes and aviation, likes to hang around on the tiny Gardner Municipal Airport along with his buddies. Till the day somebody tracked him down there to confront him in regards to the plan.
“He got here in there and mentioned ‘I suppose you’re actual happy with the truth that you’ve lowered all people’s property values,’” he mentioned.
Facing the future of green energy
Renewable energy plants do get built in Kansas.
Two hours northwest of the Knoches’ home is the Amerugi Farm. It’s 400 acres of corn, soybeans, barley, oats, rye and alfalfa, woodlands and pasture. It’s also home to one wind turbine that’s part of the Soldier Creek Wind Energy Center.
The wind undertaking, which incorporates 120 generators dotted throughout the fields of 200 taking part landowners, went into operation in 2020 and at the moment produces as much as 300 megawatts of electrical energy, about sufficient for about 64,000 properties.
Mary Fund and her husband Ed Reznicek have farmed there since 1978 on land Fund’s household has owned for the reason that 1870s. The one wind turbine on their land offers them a small lease fee.
“It’s a pleasant little addition to our retirement revenue however it’s not going to make us wealthy,” mentioned Fund, 70.
She views that turbine in a lot the identical approach her mom and aunt noticed the oil leases on the farm within the early Nineteen Eighties.
“They struck oil, so we’ve got a few oil wells on our land. They helped my mom in her previous age,” she mentioned.
Certainly, throughout the farm nation the place inexperienced vitality is now controversial, pump jacks and fuel wells have lengthy extracted from the bottom under to create a far much less inexperienced type of vitality. Nemaha County is residence to 22 oil wells and in 2022 produced 33,788 barrels of oil, sufficient to make as a lot as 675,000 gallons of gasoline.
The state as a complete has greater than 48,000 oil wells and 19,000 natural gas wells in production in 2023.
It’s a kind of karma, Fund said. “You don’t let them extract oil from your land and then not let them put up a turbine.”
They signed a lease in July 2018 that gave a three-year option for NextEra to explore use of their land as a site for a potential turbine, but only after several months of communications with the wind farm representative, visiting other windfarms to see what it felt like to be near turbines and a lot of research.
“I really have to confess I didn’t think anybody would oppose it,” she said. “I mean, why would you?”
She was wrong. Things quickly got testy, much of it organized through Facebook. Speakers railed against wind and stacks of a misinformation-filled book appeared on the counters of local businesses and local libraries all winter long.
“It was never clear who brought these into the county, but the website of South Dakotans for Safe & Responsible Renewable Energy offers a case of 30 for $1,000 donations,” she said.
The furor over the plan made the couple enemies in the place they’d lived together for 45 years, the place where Fund grew up.
“There are people who don’t talk to each other anymore, and people who grudgingly moved on and talk about everything but the wind farm,” she said. “I’ve got a neighbor who won’t talk to me, but her husband will.”
In the end, county commissioners voted to approve the wind farm in 2019. It was inbuilt 2020 and now brings about $900,000 in taxes to the county every year.
That’s on prime of the lease funds made on to landowners together with Mary and Ed.
The Soldier Creek generators dot a spare, wind-swept panorama of farms, grazing land, creeks and woodlots.
Dwelling close to the generators hasn’t bothered the couple. On quiet nights they’ll hear each the turbine and the oil wells.
However theirs appears more likely to be the final wind energy that will probably be inbuilt Nemaha County. After the primary conditional use permits have been accredited in early 2019, the county fee handed a moratorium on new tasks in Could of 2019.
In October of 2023 they handed a decision extending the moratorium for another year. A brand new County Complete Plan paperwork opposition to additional wind vitality and successfully warns off builders.
When the Knoches first began considering the possibility of a solar project on their land, they were both in their 80s. Doc was still enjoying his hobby of going up in a gas-powered hang glider. Three of their children were still in their 50s and they only had 11 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
In December 2023, everyone was older. Doc had stopped flying and suffered a fall. Donna had to be more careful when she walked.
And they weren’t much closer to having a deal.
Both Douglas and Johnson counties have passed new zoning regulations surrounding solar. In Douglas as of 2022, tasks are restricted to not more than 1,000 acres and should be a minimum of 500 toes from present residences. In Johnson, there’s a cap of two,000 acres per undertaking and a one-and-a-half mile setback from neighboring cities.
One other photo voltaic undertaking, which had nothing to do with their land, is now additionally going by means of the method in Douglas County. It ended the 12 months with a packed planning assembly that went past 2:00 am on Dec. 19, which is now headed to yet one more vote by the county fee.
The Knoches continue to live in their modest rambler, full of photos, mementos. They visit children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They offer donuts to guests and pull out scrapbooks with clippings about the project along with books on the family’s history in the area.
Both wonder at the changes they’ve seen in their lives. Donna tells of growing up with kerosene lamps and remembers when they first got an Aladdin lamp, which burned kerosene however used a mantle as a substitute of a wick.
“It was nearly like evening and day in comparison with that previous kerosene lamp,” she mentioned. “We didn’t get electrical energy out within the farm till, it was 1947 or 1948, after I was in highschool.”
Doc ponders the shifts in a state the place he first plowed with horses and mules. As he testified to the county fee, he’s not afraid solar energy will flip the county’s farmland into an industrial wasteland.
He’s afraid of the fixed push to show farms into subdivisions.
“Out right here,” he mentioned, “I feel in 5, ten years you may be glad it is there as a result of you are going to be crowded out by different individuals.”
This story was produced with assist from the McGraw Heart for Enterprise Journalism on the Craig Newmark Graduate Faculty of Journalism on the Metropolis College of New York.
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