The Vertical Patterns of Wind Energy: The Effects of Wind Farm Ownership on Rural Communities in the Prairie Pothole Region of the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
North America has experienced rapid growth in the construction of utility-scale wind farms, with over 65,000 wind turbines constructed in the past 25 years. While wind farms are located almost exclusively in rural areas, ownership of the wind energy industry is largely a mix of multinational corporate energy conglomerates along with some smaller private energy firms. Despite the growth of the wind industry, little research has examined how the ownership structure of wind farms may affect host communities, even though research on other types of energy projects demonstrates local ownership tends to have more public support and positive benefits to the community. This exploratory research involves 36 in-depth interviews with leaders and residents in three case study communities located in the U.S. states of South Dakota and Minnesota: three communities impacted by wind farms variously owned by a regional electrical cooperative, municipalities, multinational corporations, and a local-resident group. The interviews describe the types of impacts perceived to have occurred in local communities, the role that wind farm ownership appears to play in shaping these impacts and reveal broader structural attributes of the U.S. wind industry. In doing so, this research describes the unique case of Community Wind North, a 12-turbine wind farm in southwestern Minnesota that is owned by 120 local member investors. Our findings from this exploratory research in wind farm host communities suggest that it is the local context of these rural communities that shapes the effects of wind farm development far more than if the wind farm is cooperatively, cooperatively, or municipally owned. We additionally employ Roland Warren’s concepts of vertical and horizontal patterns of community to contextualize our findings, with findings that suggest the structure of the wind industry contributes to the continued advancement of the vertical patterns or linkages between rural areas and metropolitan regions. Keywords: wind energy; renewable energy; community development; Roland Warren _______________________________________________ Les Modeles Verticaux de l'Energie Eolienne: Les Effets de la Propriete de Parcs Eoliens sur les Communautes Rurales dans la Region des Fondrieres des Prairies, aux Etat-Unis. Resume L'Amerique du nord a connu une croissance rapide dans le domaine de la construction de parcs eoliens a l'echelle commerciale, avec plus de 65 000 eoliennes construites ces 25 dernieres annees. Alors que les fermes eoliennes sont presque exclusivement situees dans les zones rurales, la propriete de l'energie eolienne appartient essentiellement a des trusts multinationaux de l'energie ainsi qu'a quelques petites compagnies privees energetiques. Malgre la croissance de l'industrie eolienne, peu de recherches ont examine dans quelle mesure la structure de la propriete des parcs eoliens pourrait affecter les communautes d'accueil, meme si la recherche sur d'autres types de projets energetiques demontre que la propriete locale tend a avoir plus de support publique ainsi que des effets positifs pour la communaute. Cette recherche exploratoire implique 36 entrevues approfondies avec des dirigeants et residents de trois etudes de cas de communautes situees dans les Etats du Dakota du Sud et du Minnesota, aux Etats-Unis: trois communautes affectees par les parcs eoliens et dont la propriete est partagee entre une cooperative electrique, les municipalites, des corporations multinationales et un groupe de residents locaux. Les entrevues decrivent les types d'impacts percus qui se sont passes dans les communautes locales, le role que les proprietaires du parc eolien semblent jouer dans la limitation de ces impacts et dans la mise en evidence de plus grands avantages structurels dans l'industrie eolienne americaine. En faisant cela, cette recherche decrit le cas unique de la Communaute Eolienne du Nord, un parc eolien de 12 eoliennes du sud-ouest du Minnesota, appartenant a 120 investisseurs locaux. Nos conclusions de cette recherche exploratoire sur les parcs eoliens dans les communautes suggerent que c'est le contexte local de ces communautes rurales qui faconne les effets du developpement du parc eolien bien plus que si le parc eolien appartenait a une cooperative ou une municipalite. De plus, nous avons employe les concepts de Roland Warren sur la configuration verticale et horizontale de la communaute pour mettre en contexte nos resultats, avec des resultats qui suggerent que la structure de l'industrie eolienne contribue a l'avancement continu de la configuration verticale ou a des liens entre les zones rurales et les regions metropolitaines.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".