Often, when driving on I-55 to and from Chicago, I while away the hours with word games. (How many words mean “dull”?) Until I reach McLean County, that is, when the towers of the Twin Groves Wind Farm come into view. Even though they’ve stood there for years – the farm was built way back in 2008 – they still catch the eye. For every local who complains that these Brobdingnagian contraptions block the scenery, others enthuse that they provide the only thing worth looking at in this part of the state.
Our part of the state is likely to see many more of these energy plantations. The counties south and west of Springfield used to be central to the state’s energy future because of the coal that lies beneath them; today it’s because of the wind that blows over them. One such farm is the $450 million multiphase, multicounty Grand Prairie Energy Park whose developers hope to install some 60 wind turbines in Montgomery County and Sangamon County over the next several years.
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That project should have smoother sailing now that the General Assembly has forbidden local governments from banning wind projects if they meet the State of Illinois’ own not very onerous rigorous standards. Many of those bans were based on the impact the turbines have on local views which will now become harder to impose.
Oh well. You say “to-may-to,” I say “to-mah-to.” You say “killing democracy,” I say “saving the planet.”
A passing glimpse of one from the highway does not convey just how big they are. The wind turbines proposed for the Grand Prairie Energy Park will stand 377 feet tall at the hub, which makes them taller than the Illinois Statehouse. The tip of the top blade will be taller still, fully 55 stories or so above the ground. There is nothing else in the rural environment that comes close, unless you count tornado funnels.
As travelers know, wind towers don’t actually block our view of the rural landscape. They are too slender and their usually having been painted white means that on gray days they practically disappear. Not that there’s much left to view in mid-Illinois to begin with. Most of what made the traditional Illinois farmstead visually appealing – the corn cribs, the barns, the hedgerows – have been destroyed by modern farming. What one can still see in our rural parts, and see a lot of, is sky. The clouds are our mountains, a fit subject for a Constable if we had one. Unfortunately, wind towers are tall enough to penetrate navigable airspace, so that even if they do not block the view of our skyscape, they distract from it.
Judging from public comments, it is the things themselves that offend a lot of people. The towers don’t “fit in,” which is, like, really important in the Midwest. Wind towers are vertical, Illinois is horizontal; a cornfield is “natural,” a turbine is mechanical. The turbines are sleek and elegant; sleek and elegant is as out of place Downstate as Carhartt at a cocktail party. The corn plants growing all around may be as consummately engineered an energy collection system as any wind turbine, but it still looks like a corn plant. Wind turbines look like scarecrows designed to frighten off androids.
In fact, the mere presence of these contraptions bothers some who are driven by what we might call (with apologies to H. L. Mencken) a libido for the tidy. A farmer who freaks out at seeing a single weed in a bean field the size of Jerome will object to towers simply because they’re not soybean plants. This rather specific aesthetic is easy to lampoon but you run into the same narrow-mindedness about tidy lawns in our better subdivisions.
There are no easy answers to the problems wind farms cause the sensitive, but their presence introduces lots of interesting questions. Usually regulations seek to compensate people whose property value has been diminished by the actions of others. But can one have a right to a view that extends over other people’s land? If she leases a chunk of a field for 30 years to a wind farm, can a neighbor be said to trespass on the views of a neighbor a half mile away?
Illinois lawmakers at all levels have tended to avoid such tricky questions. The new state rules were meant merely to standardize the approval process in order to speed the transition to a 100 percent clean electricity system by 2050. The new rules thus offer no joy to opponents of wind farms in general or to rural aesthetes offended by what could be described as kinetic sculptures. As a result, the ugliest thing to loom on the landscape in the next few years is likely to be ever-larger resentment of Springfield in our rural parts.
Mr. Krohe is a public issues journalist who has written more than 1,000 columns for Illinois Times since 1975, some of which are quite good.
This article appears in December 4-10, 2025.
Solar farms are much more objectionable than wind farms.