Wind energy benefits North Dakota. So why has the state soured on it?

WISHEK, N.D. — George Wolff offered a cautious greeting through the window of my rented F-150. He was fresh from tending livestock, which explained the dried mud on his forehead and shirt. His boots and jeans were soiled with barnyard muck, his ballcap tipped back to cool his brow. 

It was a warm, breezy May day in North Dakota, with wind speeds hovering around 20 miles per hour, gusting to the low 30s. Angus cattle foraged on a hillside pasture behind Wolff’s barns. Two John Deere tractors sat idle off the driveway. Planting season was over, but a dry spring had slowed the arrival of this year’s wheat, corn, and soybeans. 

“What can I do for you?” asked Wolff, a fourth-generation farmer. The answer was about a half mile behind him, rising above his land like an enormous pinwheel. 

That 3-megawatt turbine, one of two on Wolff’s 3,500-acre property, is part of Badger Wind Farm. The 92-turbine, 250-MW project was brought online in January by the Danish energy giant Ørsted and is the newest such installation in North Dakota, which ranks ninth in the U.S. for producing wind energy.

Badger Wind Farm is the largest economic development project in the history of Wishek, an 850-person city about 90 miles southeast of Bismarck in McIntosh County. In exchange for hosting turbines on their property, Wolff and other local farmers and landowners receive lease payments from Ørsted — and the county will see an influx of tax revenues based on the project’s annual generation. 

But for many in Wishek, early optimism about the economic benefits has given way to regret and resentment, according to Larry Wald, a lifelong resident and the city’s former mayor and council member. 

“We used to live in open country, right?” Wald said. ​“Now, these towers are the first thing you see when you come into Wishek and the last thing you see on your way out.”

This notion — that the costs of wind power outweigh the benefits — is not unique to Wishek or McIntosh County. Large swaths of rural America are reevaluating their relationships with commercial-scale clean energy. While states such as California and Iowa are retooling their energy economies around carbon-free power, others are tapping the brakes as renewable energy development faces withering attacks from conservatives.

In North Dakota, many have soured on wind power after embracing it for most of the last 20 years as part of the state’s ​“all of the above” energy policy. Once a common thing, newly completed projects like Wishek’s Badger Wind Farm have become rare.

Wishek’s woes

Anchoring a Wishek park is a 9-foot-tall concrete statue of Barney the Badger, the town mascot, with a bright blue varsity sweater emblazoned with the letter ​“W.”

The statue helps explain Badger Wind Farm’s name, and is but one example of the kind of small-town charm that suffuses Wishek. 

Lila Raile, another lifelong resident, is among those who feel that charm is at risk because of the wind turbines. Her recently built ​“dream home,” atop a low hill about a mile west of Wishek’s town center, is surrounded by turbines — a backdrop she never imagined just a few years ago.

“Welcome to my nightmare,” Raile said in an email before my visit to her home, which used to offer views of rolling farmland.

Raile said the installation has fundamentally changed the agricultural character of Wishek, where farming has sustained generations of her own family. She blames Ørsted for what she characterized as a dollar-waving appeal to landowners.

But she also blames county and state elected officials for leaving the community to fend for itself against a multinational energy company. ​“They claim to protect rural communities from these outside energy companies, but people around here don’t feel protected at all,” she said. 

Wald said much of the local ire is directed at absentee landowners who signed leases with Ørsted. Many of them inherited land, he said, but have no personal connection to Wishek.

“When [Ørsted] came looking for land leases, it was like light in their eyes,” Wald said of the nonresident property owners. ​“They were going to get their $10,000 per lease, or whatever it is, and never have to look at these towers.”

Ørsted declined a formal site visit or an interview. 

Even Wolff, whose two turbines sit at the eastern edge of the wind farm and are not visible from the town center, says county officials could have mitigated the Badger project’s visual impacts through more robust planning and zoning.

“I understand why there’s a lot of strong feelings about the turbines,” he said. ​“They should have stayed further away from some of the nonparticipating residences, particularly the ones close to town.” 

Wishek had no siting authority over the Badger turbines. It did, however, receive $150,000 in direct goodwill donations from Ørsted, according to the city auditor. The money went toward constructing a new firehouse and public swimming pool and making repairs to the community center.

“Ørsted was very much like, ​‘Let us know what you need help with … because we want to have a good relationship with the city,” said Brenda Dohn, the former Wishek mayor who led the city through the project’s planning and construction phases. ​“They wanted to make sure there was some payback to the community.” 

In McIntosh County, ​“wind generation taxes” from Badger Wind Farm will yield roughly $1.3 million in tax revenue each year, according to estimates from the county auditor’s office. Those dollars will go to roads and bridges, schools, hospitals, senior care facilities, and fire and ambulatory services for the county of roughly 2,500 people. Statewide, wind energy has generated a total of more than $10 billion in economic activity, according to industry estimates. 

Nevertheless, in April — a few months after Badger Wind Farm went online — McIntosh County adopted a one-year moratorium on new wind projects, citing concerns about how another Ørsted project, proposed for the south part of the county, would impact nonparticipant property owners. Badger is the second wind farm in the county; the Merricourt wind farm went online in 2020.

Dohn, who stepped down after clashing with Wishek council members over a proposed data center at the edge of town, said she hopes the community can mend its strained social fabric now that Badger Wind Farm is operating.

“It’s here. You have to change your mindset,” she said. ​“You may not like what’s happened, but OK, now what? You can’t light them on fire, you can’t kick them over. So how do we move forward from this?”

Winding down

North Dakota got its first large-scale wind farm in 2003, when NextEra Energy Resources completed its North Dakota Wind I and II installations in LaMoure County, about 50 miles east of Wishek.

In the years that followed, the state pursued an energy policy inclusive of coal, oil, natural gas, and carbon-free energy sources like wind. The boom times continued from there. Developers were attracted to North Dakota for its wide-open, windswept land and proximity to Minnesota, which needs clean energy to meet its decarbonization goals.

“We had such an escalation in numbers with new wind farms coming online, and so much interest in the state, that we basically saw a new industry [established] within just a few years,” said Tom Oakland, energy research and development manager at the North Dakota Department of Commerce.

But now, North Dakota lawmakers and public officials, including many who once touted that all-of-the-above policy, are asking whether the state has reached its carrying capacity for wind turbines.

North Dakota saw 38 wind farms come online between 2005 and 2020 — but only four, including Badger, have been completed in the years since. 

The pipeline is not exactly robust. The state Public Service Commission is currently considering just one other project: the 67-turbine Homestead Wind Farm, proposed for Williams County. On Aug. 12, the commission approved the nearly $800 million Longspur wind project proposed by Minnesota Power for north of Bismarck — the first approval since Badger and only one so far this year. 

The commission is increasingly wary of wind, despite the Longspur approval. Chair Randy Christmann has repeatedly asserted that the expansion of wind power will advance environmentalists’ agenda to close more than a half dozen legacy coal plants in the state. 

During public testimony in May over the Longspur project, Christmann challenged Richard Schirado, a rancher and inventor who hosts turbines on his property, over Schirado’s belief that wind energy ​“has not eliminated or significantly harmed traditional energy sources like coal.” 

“Would it surprise you to know that in about the last 20 years, about 35 or 40 percent of the coal capacity in America has come off the grid?” Christmann asked. 

“No, it wouldn’t surprise me, but I think they need to work together,” Schirado answered. 

“But one is being added and the other one is being pushed out,” Christmann responded. ​“That’s how they’re working together, is it?”

While coal-fired power generation has declined nationally with the rise of natural gas and renewables, North Dakota’s retirements have been more modest than some other states. Minnesota-based Great River Energy closed its 50-year-old Stanton Station in 2017, while Montana-Dakota Utilities retired two small coal units at its R.M. Heskett Station in 2022 as part of a natural gas conversion project. 

Although North Dakota produces immense amounts of wind power, much of it is exported to neighboring states. Seventy-six percent of the electricity consumed in-state comes from five coal plants concentrated in North Dakota’s mining region. All those plants burn lignite, which emits more air pollution per unit of energy than any other form of coal, as well as significant quantities of toxic mercury.

The argument that wind is hampering the state’s coal sector has been around at least since 2017, when then-Sen. Dwight Cook, a Republican who chaired the powerful finance and taxation committee, proposed legislation to impose a two-year ban on wind farms, citing the wind industry’s disruption to the state’s coal economy. The bill was withdrawn, and Cook retired in 2020.

More recently, Republican state Rep. Anna Novak, interim chair of the North Dakota Legislative Assembly’s Energy Development and Transmission Committee and vice chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has asserted that wind is a bad deal because of its potential impacts on coal.

“For many years, it was kind of like, ​‘We can do everything, we can have it all, and it’s more economic activity for our area,’” said Novak, who represents what North Dakotans call ​“coal country.” ​“But there has been the realization that more wind on the line, specifically in coal country, means that there’s less coal that’s mined and used for electricity generation.”

North Dakota’s sole member of the U.S. House of Representatives takes the same pro-coal, anti-wind stance.

In 2025, freshman Republican Rep. Julie Fedorchak sponsored a bill to phase out long-standing federal tax credits for wind and solar energy, something achieved in the 2025 Republican tax and spending bill known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Fedorchak has also been one of President Donald Trump’s strongest supporters for reviving the nation’s coal industry — a push happening alongside Trump’s all-out war on wind energy. 

Fedorchak’s office did not respond to requests for comment. But in a recent interview with Axios, she echoed wind critics like Christmann and Novak, who argue that North Dakota’s wind power growth is not serving the state itself and is instead driven by outside interests.

“It’s for that very reason — the expansion has been designed to help bring in the power needed for states like Minnesota to meet their goals,” Fedorchak said. ​“And those aren’t the goals in my state of North Dakota.”

Farming energy

Wolff, for his part, still supports the state’s all-of-the-above energy policy, though he was careful to emphasize that he is not a ​“green freak.”

“If someone came out here and said they wanted to put an oil well on the farm, I’d listen,” he said.

“Some of the farmers here, they think if you don’t make your money off of a bushel of wheat or a pound of beef, it’s not right,” Wolff said during a conversation at his kitchen table. ​“I don’t feel that way. I think, well, they’re producing electricity, and that’s something we all use. So if you can make it work, then do it.”

A few days after my visit, Wolff received his first quarterly check from Ørsted. Each turbine netted about $5,000, money that will help him meet the rising costs of fuel, fertilizer, and feed. It may also allow him and his wife, Janet, to spend more time away from the farm — and possibly escape North Dakota’s bone-chilling winter.

If the wind boom is truly over for North Dakota, so, too, are its opportunities for farmers like Wolff. All told, landowners have netted between $25 million and $30 million annually since 2020, according to industry officials.

“I’m kind of on my way out here,” Wolff said. ​“It will eventually be my son’s decision on how to handle it. Either way, I plan to do what my forefathers did, which is pass this on to my kids. They’ll figure out the best way forward.”