Purdue University College of Agriculture funded studies shows Hoosiers, and possibly by extension, Midwesterners, are pretty receptive to wind energy. This school news release says that can even be true for areas that might have rejected wind turbine development:
Linda Prokopy, an associate professor of natural resources planning, said much of the research on attitudes toward wind energy and wind farms has focused on coastal states and the reasons people don’t want turbines in their communities. She and Kate Mulvaney, a former graduate student, wanted to know how people in the Midwest feel about having wind farms in their communities and the factors that led some places to embrace or reject them.
Prokopy and Mulvaney published two studies on their results in the journals Energy Policy and Environmental Management. One focused on Benton County, Indiana, which has embraced wind farms. The other study compared Benton County with two other Indiana counties – Boone County, which rejected wind farm development, and Tippecanoe County, which at the time was still considering wind farms. The researchers conducted surveys and interviews and studied local newspaper articles on wind energy.
“We found that there is not a lot of opposition from the people in the Midwest,” Prokopy said. “And there are not a lot of perceived negative impacts from people who have or live near wind turbines.”
The survey found that more than 80 percent of respondents said they either supported wind farms in their counties or supported them with reservations. Those most opposed to wind turbines seemed to be those who worked in big cities, such as Indianapolis, but lived in rural areas. They were small in number but loud in opposition.