Wind project in southern Minnesota gets pushback

GLENVILLE, Minn. – The vista from Dorenne Hansen’s kitchen window features corn and soybean fields specked with barns and tree groves. It may also one day include three wind turbine towers and a power line — though not if she can help it.

Hansen and other residents are fighting to stop the Freeborn Wind Farm project in Freeborn County southeast of Albert Lea.

“I want quiet and dark nights, not the noise and red flashing lights on top of wind towers,” she said. “We did not choose to live out here to be next to an industrial park.”

Wind farms commonly generate some local antipathy as they grow both in number and economic importance to the energy industry, but the Freeborn project has sparked a higher level of opposition. It has been intense enough to prompt Freeborn Wind’s developer, Invenergy, to move more than half the project — 58 turbines — across the border to Iowa.

Read more: http://www.startribune.com/wind-project-in-southern-minnesota-gets-pushback/458079653/