Offshore Wind Sails Forward, But a Different Story on Land

Even as Rhode Island makes history as the first U.S. state with an offshore wind farm, its people are not so fond of wind turbines sprouting up on land near where they live.

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Dreams of a wind-powered nation sparked by the pioneering Atlantic Ocean project are running aground back on shore, where conventional battles over aesthetics and property values have stymied wind projects here and around the country.

Ruth Pacheco said she didn’t expect so much hostility when she invited a developer to build a giant wind turbine atop a forested hill at her 52 acre family farm in rural North Smithfield.

The 86-year-old proprietor of the Hi-on-a-Hill Herb Farm believes harvesting wind energy is the best way to preserve the land her family has owned and cultivated since the 1840s. But she wasn’t prepared for the dozens of “No Turbine” signs, erected outside nearly every home on the road leading up to her farm.

“We’ve lived here all our lives and seen people come and go,” Pacheco said. “I guess you just can’t take it personally. They’ve got tunnel vision out there.”

Responding to the ire of Pacheco’s neighbors, North Smithfield leaders are now drafting a town-wide ban on wind turbines, though it is too late to affect Pacheco’s project because it already has a permit.

Compared with the five-turbine, 30-megawatt offshore wind farm recently completed in blustery state waters and scheduled to switch on this fall, Rhode Island’s 20 land-based wind turbines are more modest generators of energy, with a combined capacity of about 21 megawatts, enough to power more than 6,000 homes, or a small town about the size of North Smithfield.