Opposition to large solar and wind farms grows in Kansas
One farm family hopes to see a solar energy plant built on their land. But in some places, efforts to build utility-scale solar and wind farms are met with fierce opposition.
GARDNER, Kansas − Donna Knoche made her way up to the podium at the Johnson County Commission hearing on June 6, 2022, her new yellow shirt crisp and her voice steady. It wasn’t something she’d ever thought she’d have to do in her 93 years in the place her grandfather first homesteaded in the 1860s.
Calmly setting aside her walker, she looked at the county commissioners arrayed to her left and began to speak.
“I never in all my life thought I would stand up here to protect our property rights by being able to use our land legally for the best benefit of our family,” she said.
Scores of people were in line behind her. Many of them had other ideas.
Some implored the commissioners to vote to allow the so-called West Gardner plan, a utility-size array of solar panels, saying the county needed to commit to clean energy for their children’s future.
But others were just as passionately opposed. Many wore matching T-shirts that implored the council to “Stop INDUSTRIAL SOLAR,” testifying for more than three hours against the plan for Knoche’s farm and others across the county.
To them, the solar plant would “threaten health and well-being” and did not fit “the character of the land.” It would create “a landscape of black glass and towering windmills,” that would put lives at risk and cause “a mass exodus out of the area.”
The fight played out in front of one small county commission in one 613,000-person county. But at its heart, this fight – and hundreds of others like it across the country – was over the future of the whole nation’s energy supply and, perhaps, the future of the planet.
As the country races to shift to carbon-free energy to forestall climate change, opposition movements have popped up nationwide to fight new solar and wind farms, hampering America’s chances of meeting its climate pledges.
A USA TODAY analysis of local rules and policies nationwide found that, as of December, 15% of counties in the United States had banned or otherwise blocked new utility-scale wind farms, solar installations or both.
In the past decade, 183 U.S. counties had their first wind projects start producing power, while nearly 375 blocked new wind turbines. In 2023, almost as many counties blocked new solar projects as added them.
The reasons for local opposition are varied and the motives behind them can be murky but often boil down to one essential idea: Renewables are fine, but we don’t want them here.
That’s a problem, said Grace Wu, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies energy systems and land use change. “If nowhere seems to be the right place, increasingly we’ll have a harder and harder time to site them.”
The land owned by the Knoche family is just one spot in a statewide fight in Kansas, which has both the nation’s fourth best wind resources and, as solar power technology has become more efficient, strong solar as well: the same sunlight that drives photosynthesis in large-scale crops like corn can generate energy in solar panels.
Today, the state gets 47.13% of its electricity from wind and 0.33% from solar.
Yet now, 14 of the 105 counties in Kansas block wind turbines and 12 block solar farms. These include outright bans, height restrictions, unworkable setbacks for turbines, size limitations for solar farms, caps on the amount of agricultural land that can be used and, in McPherson County, an “indefinite moratorium” on solar applications.
These efforts mirror those in hundreds of counties and townships across the nation, where the merest hint of a potential project quickly brings forth a Facebook group, yard signs, organized protests and – increasingly – zoning rules and laws that make new renewable energy impossible to build.
Seen as just one flare-up in a nationwide trend to oppose local green-energy projects, the fight in Johnson County shouldn’t be surprising.
But to Donna Knoche, 93, and her husband Robert “Doc” Knoche, 95, it’s bewildering – and annoying.
For them, leasing acres to a solar farm would simplify their land’s care, keep it available for farming when the lease runs out and allow it to continue to be passed on through the generations.
“We figured it was just one of those sorts of things that you could do – like buying a house or leasing a car. You could just do it on your own and not have to deal with all this complexity,” Donna said.
Instead, it has become a five-year battle.
“I had no idea it would drag on this long,” said 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 originally proposed to include as much as 3,000 acres spread over Douglas and Johnson counties…
Read More:How one couple’s land lease became a fight
2024-02-05 08:57:44
