As a Midwestern boy, I truly appreciate the beauty of the sky. The clouds can take my breath away, and I have to admit I may not be driving the straightest line on a stormy day. No, I’m not texting, I’m staring out the window, mouth agape. The scale of what I’m looking at is difficult to guess. Is that cloud a mile away? Ten? Church steeples and water towers shrink to bumps. Only grain elevators brave the sky, guarding towns and clusters of houses. Well, until now.

These are turbines 11, 12, 13, & 14 at Invenergy’s California Ridge wind farm, about six miles southeast of Rantoul. The entire project includes 134 turbines and stretches east into Vermilion County. The turbines are rated at 1.6 MW, and have a 100 meter rotor diameter/spread. I was unhappy to find out that all the power from this project has already been contracted to the Tennessee Valley Authority, so I won’t see any power from these turbines.

The construction progress has been steady, one of the few good things about the drought this July. The huge tower sections have been rumbling along back roads all summer, but the trucks delivering the blades have been able to use the interstate, so I haven’t seen as many of them. I suspect that there may be a problem in the nacelle supply chain, because I can see a lot of unfinished turbines. One of the sites had the blades attached to the hub, ready to be lifted, but no nacelle in sight, and at least one section of the tower missing.

The last sections of the tower may be installed right before the nacelle is attached, because I saw the tapering sections on the ground at the next site, at the foot of the massive crane.

This farm is scheduled to be functional by the end of this year, and none of the completed turbines were spinning today. That is fine by me, since I have written before how unnerving I find that motion. However, I can’t argue with the economic impact of the farm. The construction company is based in Indiana and Ontario, but local motels and restaurants are benefiting from the workers. My neighbor told me that each turbine earns the landowner $8,000 a year, along with money from the access roads and the wiring connecting the turbine to the grid. With those kinds of numbers, I believe we will see more wind farms being built on the end moraines from ancient glaciers.

The future makes a whooshing sound.