CEP Conversations: Dan Nagengast on community wind
January 21, 2008
Welcome to CEP’s new Conversations series, where we interview experts on climate and energy topics.
Dan Nagengast, Kansas Rural Center (KRC) Executive Director and community wind advocate, recently sat down for a chat with Maril Hazlett of the Climate and Energy Project (CEP).
This spring, KRC and CEP will sponsor community wind development workshops for six to eight interested counties in Kansas. For more information, please email info@climateandenergy.org.
Maril Hazlett: Hi, Dan. Why don’t you start out by telling folks little bit about who you are, what you do for a living, and how you came to the issue of community wind.
Dan Nagengast: I have a long history of trying to figure out how to make rural areas more economically viable and trying to find opportunity for young people and existing farmers. I grew up in western Nebraska on a farm 15 miles outside of a town of 300 people and spent all my young years there. I spent many, many years in west Africa working in communities there. Then I came back to Kansas and worked on hunger programs for Church World Service. We raised money through Crop Walks for years and years.
Now I work for the KRC. A little while ago I had the good fortune to visit Minnesota with a group from the Kansas Energy Office and the Governors Rural Life Task Force, which I was chairing. We went to southwestern Minnesota -
MH: Wow. Cool stuff going on there.
DN: Yes, it’s the hot bed of community wind. You can see hundreds of towers out in farmers’ fields – not in grasslands. These towers are owned by farmers, as much as possible, or by municipalities or schools.
And you can just see the prosperity of the countryside. You can see the tax benefits flowing into the school system and into the bridges, into the county commissioner’s office, all those sorts of things.
MH: Why wind? Why right now?
DN: Wind is a form of renewable energy, and it doesn’t emit the greenhouse gases that lead to climate change. It’s a natural resource-based crop.
It used to be – well, there was soil, water, feed, farmers, and we cussed the wind. And now it could be soil, waters, feed, farmers – and oh, we like the wind. If it is structured right, the wind could function as entirely another crop, and its harvest could help firm up rural economies.
