photo by: AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File

Wind turbines are silhouetted against the sky at sunset Dec. 17, 2021, near Ellsworth, Kansas.

Jack Thimesch, county commissioner in Kingman County, will tell you what the biggest threat is to the future of wind energy. It is not the Audubon Society, it is not the Farm Bureau, it is not even Big Oil.

Rather, the county commissioner who has three wind farms in his county and one more under construction, said the biggest threat is Facebook, and the ease with which it spreads misinformation. Such misinformation, he said, can make nearly anything impossible to accomplish.

“With Facebook and everything that goes on there, if today was the day we were going to drill the first oil well, it wouldn’t happen,” Thimesch said.

Thimesch, who was a panelist at Thursday’s Kansas Economic Policy Conference at KU, had an ally about the damaging impact of misinformation on renewable energy efforts. Douglas County Commissioner Karen Willey also was a panelist and said she’s seen a sharp increase in the amount of misinformation on the subject in Douglas County in just the last two years.

She’s not convinced all of it has sprung up naturally, either.

“It felt like it was being fueled by outside sources, outside of our community, and just ginning up this anger,” Willey said of the public debate surrounding the county’s recently approved regulations regarding wind farms.

Willey and her fellow commissioners approved Douglas County’s set of regulations that would allow large-scale wind farms to locate in the county in May. Whether any wind farms will come to Douglas County is an open question. At least one company is conducting studies of the feasibility, but no company has yet made a formal proposal to locate a wind farm in the county. The regulations were criticized from both sides of the argument. Many residents wanted a complete moratorium on wind projects, while representatives of the wind industry complained the setbacks the county put in place are so large that it will make many projects infeasible.

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

Douglas County Commissioner Karen Willey participated in the Kansas Economic Policy Conference at the University of Kansas on Oct. 24, 2024.

Willey told the audience at the Burge Union on the University of Kansas campus that she suspected wind energy may not be a major part of the county’s future.

“I do think we are probably too populated in Douglas County to be a great fit for that,” Willey said.

Solar farms may be a different matter. Willey earlier this year joined her two fellow commissioners to give preliminary approval to the Kansas Sky Energy Center, a large solar farm project that would add about 8 million square feet of solar panels to the Kansas River valley in northern Douglas County. The project still must win additional approvals from the county — a stormwater plan hasn’t yet been approved — before the project can begin construction. A group of businesses and neighbors also have sued the county over the project, creating questions about whether the development will be allowed to move forward.

While Willey said population issues might make Douglas County a less-than-ideal fit for wind energy, she said such issues weren’t as prevalent with solar energy.

“Everything is different between wind and solar,” Willey told the Journal-World in a brief interview Thursday. “We like to lump them together and say they are two renewable energy sources, but in terms of land use and people’s perceptions of them and interaction with them, everything is different.”

Specifically, Willey said the differences related to site issues between the two types of renewable energy sources are great. While arrays of solar panels can be constructed closely together and in clusters, wind turbines are much more spread out. That’s where Douglas County’s population, and the number of small-lot rural homes in the county, may be tough for wind developers to work around, she said.

What type of political appetite will remain for renewable energy projects in Douglas County, however, remains to be seen. After the November elections, the County Commission is guaranteed to have at least two new members and might have as many as four. Several candidates running for the commission have expressed opposition to industrial-scale wind and solar projects. Willey herself faces an opponent, Pam McDermott, who has generally campaigned against such projects.

At Thursday’s conference, Willey told the crowd that the American public in general might need to change its thinking about energy projects as the country continues to consume more and more energy.

“It seems fair, if we are going to rely so heavily on a product, that we also take some responsibility for seeing it, hearing and taking ownership of it,” Willey said, which she noted Douglas County has done for years by being home to a coal-fired power plant.

But seeing it and hearing it is what many people don’t like about wind turbines. Thimesch, the Kingman commissioner, said he thinks that some of those attitudes would soften if more people experienced the turbines firsthand. He lives near a turbine and said he’s grown to not even notice its noise or lights.

Kingman County Commissioner Jack Thimesch participated in the Kansas Economic Policy Conference at the University of Kansas on Oct. 24, 2024.

He said there are plenty of people — although not everyone — in Kingman County who think the wind farms have been a good trade-off. Although the wind farms are tax-exempt currently, they do sign development agreements that provide revenue and infrastructure assistance to the county.

He said during the last four years, the county’s property tax rate has dropped by 6.5 mills, which he said would not have been possible without the wind farm development in the county.

But still, he said getting public support for wind farms across the state will be difficult. He did offer the conference crowd — which included state legislators, energy leaders and other top public officials — an idea for how to make the process easier. What if residents in counties that hosted wind farm projects got a discount on their utility rates? That could be particularly attractive for rural counties that often have population growth as one of their major goals.

“Who wouldn’t want to live in Kingman County if (electricity) were a third less?” Thimesch said. “Make it an incentive.”