Pitched as source of clean energy, ranchers say mills are an eyesore (TX NIMBYs) [View All]

[jpak]

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/energy/4525919.html

JACKSBORO — The wind rustling the oak trees on the Squaw Mountain Ranch soon may be its undoing as a starkly empty, unspoiled corner of North Texas.

Riding the boom that last year pushed Texas past California as the nation's leading wind energy producer, a wind power company wants to scatter 100 turbines across an area roughly nine miles long and two miles wide, with at least a dozen of the 250-foot towers on the ranch.

"I'm not interested in having blinking red lights causing the Milky Way not to be as bright or to hear them when now I hear nothing up here except the sounds of nature," said ranch manager Dan Stephenson, explaining why the ranch declined to lease land for the project and objects to its neighbors leasing as well.

"Wind farm, that's a spin term," Stephenson said as he took in a vista of tree-covered ridgelines. "I call them wind turbine industrial zones."

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