Humans of St. Norbert:

“My family has some acreage down in central Indiana. We’ve got about one and a half square miles of acres spread out across a number of different counties. We mostly just lease the land so it becomes the issue of how best to monetize that value. When the windmill industry started building wind farms, they came to farmers and would lease plots. So we had about five windmills that were built on our property where we lease the land. It was really interesting to watch the construction of it and the operation of it but recently, we sold the leases.

“Compared to normal farming, if you will, it is actually quite profitable. The leases themselves are about two times what you would get in cash rent so it’s a pretty lucrative option. You get the lease option and then you get a commission on the wind that is harvested from that particular mill. The broader community, a lot of times, kind of push back because it does change the character. You’ve gone from a very rural setting and then you have this big industrial-sized windmill plopped down and if it’s in eyesight of your house you’re probably not a fan. It changes the night view, it changes the day view so I get why people are sometimes not fans.

“The wind farm is in Tipton county and we have other acreage in Madison county and within that footprint there is a proposal to put in a solar farm. It’s about three times as lucrative because they take up the entire plot. So with the windmill, you are still farming around it, but with solar they need the whole thing. The solar farm that they are talking about doing down there would power a small city. It’s interesting because solar farms operate in the day time and then it's not generating electricity at night. Wind farming, on the other hand, the winds tend to blow stronger at night so you end up with this solar during the day and wind at night. Then you obviously still need a place to generate electricity in those in between hours. The one piece of this equation about renewable energy that really hasn’t been solved very well is how you store the energy and how you deal with peaks. You still have to invest in the traditional infrastructure because otherwise you end up with brownouts and things.” – Dan Heiser, dean of the Schneider School of Business and Economics and professor of business administration