photo by: Celia Llopis-Jepsen / Kansas News Service

Hundreds of windmills dot the plains of Ford County, near Dodge City and Spearville.

Wind power can spark passionate reactions – at times dividing neighbors and communities – but unlike many other hot-button topics, how this one shakes out across Kansas may not follow political lines.

Researchers at the University of Kansas have begun exploring the drivers behind the regulations that vary county by county and control where wind farms are – and aren’t – allowed.

They’ve created a first-of-its-kind interactive atlas that pulls together rules for the state’s 105 counties, creating “a real gold mine” for analysts to plumb in search of patterns, urban planning associate professor Ward Lyles said.

That gold mine will get richer in the coming weeks, when the Kansas Energy Transition Atlas expands to include local solar regulations. After that, the team will expand the project to additional states with significant wind energy potential.

The atlas appears to be the first time this level of transparency has become available for local rules across an entire state.

Kansas ranks No. 4 nationally in terms of wind production.

Just over half of the state’s counties either tolerate or encourage wind development through local regulations. Often they have rules for how far turbines must be set back from roads or buildings.

New wind farms are banned in about one-fifth of the state’s counties. Much of this relates to bipartisan, state-level decisions to protect a swath of eastern Kansas that includes the Flint Hills – the world’s largest remaining tallgrass prairie region.

County-level decisions also play a role in restricting wind power, in the Flint Hills and beyond. Shawnee, Linn, McPherson, Harvey and Sedgwick counties, for example, have adopted moratoriums on new installations.

Some Kansas counties – primarily in the western half of the state – haven’t taken any action to either restrict or encourage wind power.

photo by: Courtesy University of Kansas

This is a sample of data from the Kansas Energy Transition Atlas.

The creators of the atlas hope to give residents a reliable place to check how renewable energy is regulated, including setback rules and other details.

They also hope to inform policymakers about the local regulatory landscape that impacts the nation’s efforts to reduce its emissions, said Ian Njuguna, an urban planning master’s student who helped design the atlas and built the online platform.

“The planning regulations and the grid network are the biggest barriers” to achieving federal goals for a cleaner power grid, Njuguna said. “But then when you ask the policymakers, ‘OK, how is the local (regulatory) landscape?’ most of them don’t know what’s happening down there.”

The Biden administration set several key targets aimed at eliminating the U.S. economy’s net emissions by 2050. This included a goal of transitioning the power grid to 100% “clean energy” by 2035. (The administration included renewable energy, nuclear power and fossil fuels paired with carbon capture in this definition.)

County commissions have more sway over renewable energy installations than other forms of power generation, such as coal or nuclear power.

But building a complete picture of local regulations isn’t easy.

A team of faculty and students spent one to three hours per county to find and review wind power regulations. Some counties post this information online; others don’t, requiring researchers to contact officials.

Solar regulation is arguably even more complex because cities can get involved, too.

“At the city level, you find the solar regulations are more for lower-scale solar projects,” such as backyard or rooftop panels, Njuguna said. “At the county level, it’s more like the utility scale.”

Though time-intensive, gathering this information allows researchers to explore correlations between local renewable energy rules and demographics, including income and politics.

County regulations don’t appear to reflect partisan politics, Lyles said. The team looked at voting patterns in the 2020 national elections.

Counties with mid-sized populations appear more likely to pass rules allowing wind power, while counties with larger populations are more likely to pass rules that limit or ban it, the researchers found.

Lyles said wind installations may meet with more opposition in places like Shawnee, Douglas and Johnson counties and along Interstate 135 in central Kansas, while residents of some less populous counties may see turbines as a potential boon to the local economy that could help farmers “either graze or plow around that and keep a farm in the family.”

Landowners can collect thousands of dollars in annual payments for each wind turbine that they host on their property. One farm real estate company says the average turbine payment in Iowa is $9,000 per year, but it has seen per-turbine payments that vary from $4,000 to $16,000.

Bigger turbines tend to bring bigger payments.

New wind farms use taller turbines than older ones do. As of last year, about one-tenth of the 4,000 wind turbines in Kansas were taller than the Statue of Liberty.

— Celia Llopis-Jepsen reports for Kansas News Service.