TOPEKA, Kansas – After wind turbines came to Ford County in 2006, the roads got fixed, schools were rebuilt and for the first time in decades, dozens of new houses were constructed. 
“We just added another crop,” said Deloyce McKee, 76, whose family has farmed and ranched in Ford County since at least 1910. “We still grow wheat, we still have cattle. The wind towers do not take away the value of the ground.”
The money from the county’s more than 300 turbines has spurred new housing and helped fill seats at local eateries like the Windmill Restaurant and the Spearville Turbine Bar & Grill. The area’s two Best Western hotels have seen a surge of stays, often from wind farm maintenance technicians. 
“People say they’re ugly – but when you drive down from Dodge City, it’s just like watching tumbleweeds in the sky,” McKee said of the wind farm, Spearville Wind, whose towers produce enough electricity to power as many as 200,000 homes. 
Another, Pioneer Creek Wind, is under construction and anticipated to generate $36 million in landowner payments and $84 million in county tax revenue over its lifespan, said county commissioner Shawn Tasset.
Harvesting energy has long been an economic windfall for rural America, from the coal mines of Appalachia to the fracking sites of Pennsylvania and the oil derricks of Texas and New Mexico. In recent years, wind and solar farms joined the list, dotting farmland across the country and providing the nation’s fastest-growing source of energy.  
But now, more U.S. counties are making it difficult — or even impossible — to build large-scale wind or solar projects, according to a new USA TODAY investigation. 
USA TODAY reporting in 2023 found that at least 15% of U.S. counties had limited the construction of new wind or solar projects. Now, at least 24% of counties ‒ nearly one in four ‒ have restricted construction of these energy sources.
President Donald Trump has led the charge, calling wind farms “ugly” and moving the country away from renewable sources of energy and back toward coal and oil.
Since the start of his second term in January 2025, the Trump administration has gone on a regulatory and legislative blitz by slowing or blocking new wind and solar projects on federal lands and making the permitting process for projects on private and state lands substantially more difficult and time-consuming. 
“If you don’t get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail,” Trump told a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in September.
For over a decade, county and state governments have been making it harder to produce renewable energy.  
Efforts to block new power projects are happening even as the United States is expected to see burgeoning energy demands. Electricity demand is anticipated to increase by at least 35% and possibly as much as 50% by 2040, according to research by S&P Global. 
Unsubsidized wind and solar power have been the cheapest forms of newly-built energy for the past decade, according to the global financial services firm Lazard. 
Building out power quickly will be difficult. Natural gas plants can take five to seven years to construct due to backlogs of the necessary turbines. Small modular nuclear reactors are being commissioned, but won’t go into commercial operation until at least the year 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.
By contrast, building a new wind or solar plant typically takes between a year and 18 months, and a nuclear reactor can cost tens of millions of dollars.
“We need more power and we need it fast,” said John Szoka, CEO of the Conservative Energy Network.  
Szoka, who served in the North Carolina House of Representatives for 10 years and the Army for 20, worries some places will have to conserve energy or cope with dimmind lights in the coming years if the United States doesn’t make use of its plentiful and free sun and wind. 
“I don’t care where the electrons come from, I just like cheap energy,” Szoka said.
Turning our backs on wind and solar will also put the U.S. behind the rest of the world, said Alan Anderson, a Kansas City-based energy lawyer.
“Our prosperity and national security depend on new electricity generation, and wind, solar, and battery storage remain the fastest, most scalable options we have,” Anderson said. “If we embrace renewables, we keep jobs, investment, and security here at home; if we don’t, we cede those opportunities ‒ and our strategic advantage ‒ to other countries.”
For Dane Simpson, new wind farms brought work to his 10,000-member Laborers’ Union in Illinois.
He noticed a pattern: Every time his members built a wind farm, they’d be back in the same community three to five years later to build a school.
He’s now logged almost $1 billion in school construction projects directly linked to wind energy.
In his hometown of El Paso, Illinois, which has two nearby wind farms, the tax revenue helped fund construction of a state-of-the-art grade school, a new junior high and a gymnasium and football field for the high school.
“Suddenly they were hosting volleyball tournaments, basketball tournaments and wrestling tournaments,” said Simpson, who directs the Great Plains Laborers-Employers Cooperation and Education Trust.
Local shops have seen a very visible boom in businesses, too. 
“When there’s a tournament, all those families stop at the local gas station and get gas and donuts and coffee,” Simpson said. “The McDonald’s usually has a line around the corner when those events are coming through.”
Nationally, wind and solar projects generated $5.7 billion annually in state and local taxes and lease payments to mostly rural landowners, according to data from the American Clean Power Association.
“This may be the greatest economic opportunity they have seen in decades,” said Sarah Mills, a professor of land use and energy policy at the University of Michigan.
It’s also a boon for areas that once depended on agriculture but no longer can.
For more than 150 years, California’s Fresno County has been a major producer of grapes, almonds, pistachios and tomatoes. But drought and overuse have raised water costs, causing farmers in the western part of the county to leave more than 200,000 acres of land fallow. Now 9,500 of those acres will become the world’s largest solar and battery storage system.
Some other examples of economic growth driven by solar and wind projects:
Wind power plants and solar farms were initially very popular in rural areas, where they were built for simple reasons: there’s open land, good sun and in the Midwest, fantastic wind. 
In especially sunny or windy places, just how much state power comes from renewable sources can be startling. 
Iowa now gets 63% of its electricity from wind, Kansas 52% and Oklahoma 41%.
For solar, California gets 35% of its electricity from solar, Nevada 31%, Arizona 16% and Texas 8%.
Even so, especially as renewable energy has become more politicized, solar and wind projects often generate more public opposition than other energy sources.
In January, Trump called wind turbines “losers” and bragged that his administration had not approved one turbine since he returned to office. 
He also added – falsely – that China has not built any wind turbines. In 2024, 18% of China’s electricity came from solar and wind, according to the energy think tank Ember.
None of this bodes well for the future of the United States on the world stage, said Julio Friedmann, an expert on carbon, hydrogen and biofuels at Carbon Direct, a company that provides climate solutions.
“In all likelihood, the actions will strengthen China’s position as a global leader,” said Friedmann, who formerly taught at Columbia University. “At worst, the U.S. may surrender its many advantages.”
The initial objections to wind and solar projects were largely aesthetic. Some people simply didn’t like to look at solar panels or giant turbines, others said they moved to rural and agricultural areas for the “viewscape” and considered the projects to be “visual pollution.” 
Nearby residents sometimes complained about noise made by the turbines as they turned. Others worried, without evidence, that the turbines would drip chemicals into the groundwater or harm birds.
These objections have become highly politicized, though in surprising ways. Following the lead of President Trump, Republicans at the state and county levels are typically against renewable energy. 
At the more liberal end of the Democratic party, states like California made it harder to build wind and solar because of concerns that they will harm wildlife, use up wilderness areas or diminish natural beauty.
In some counties, the views defy partisan politics.
In Juab County, Utah, almost 90% of voters opted for Trump in 2024. But folks in the county seat of Nephi and surrounding areas have come around to solar.
A 600-acre plot of land that was bringing in just $400 a year in taxes now provides more than $500,000 annually, roughly half of which goes to the school district. The project, which has been open since 2021, generates enough energy to power more than 25,000 households.
The property was “literally sagebrush and rattlesnakes. It wasn’t being used for anything,” said Kodey Hughes, superintendent of the county’s Juab School District.
The project itself sits on a dry hillside just north of the town of Mona. During the growing season, the more than 240,000 panels of the Clover Creek Solar Project are kept free of sagebrush by sheep that happily graze between the lines, napping in the shade of the panels during the hottest parts of the day.
“They keep everything clean,” said Seth McPherson, the electrician who tends to the array. “The sheep come in March and are taken out when the snow flies.”
Not everyone is thrilled when wind or solar comes to town. Jerry Warren is a sixth-generation farmer whose family has been working the land in Randolph County, Indiana, since 1849. 
He says he’s “kind of gun-shy” when it comes to wind or solar on his ground. He’d rather see farms than panels in part because farms employ more people.
“When you start thinking about the person that sells the feed, the person that sells the fertilizer, the person that applies the fertilizer, the person that sells the herbicides, the person that applies the herbicides, the farmer that farms the ground … then you have a local market like the feed mill or the ethanol plant or something like that who also get a piece of that income. All these people I mentioned are locals, and they buy locally, and they shop locally,” Warren said. 
Jon Peacock also farms in Randolph County. He wonders what the vast corn and soybean fields around him are going to look like when his grandsons want to farm.
“If 50 years from now they look at this county, and all they see is solar panels and if they want to farm ‒ do you have to move somewhere to farm or to be able to buy ground?” he said.
Some of his friends who own land nearby are in favor of solar, he said, because the money being offered per acre “could change your way of life.”
But just because something’s good for some people, or even the whole county, doesn’t make him like it. 
“Our commissioners tell me, and tell the committee and they tell the public that for the greater good sometimes, there have to be some people that are on the short end. I don’t think we need to do that to our neighbors,” he said. “There are golden rules written about things like this. You know, ‘do unto others.’”
Back in Kansas, McKee understands the emotion people can feel about the landscape. But in the end, she said, it comes down to the right of a community to thrive.
The Spearville Wind money “went to fix up the schools. No taxpayers had to pay for that, but all taxpayers benefited,” she said.
And that’s not even counting property rights, McKee added. “When people say they don’t want to look at the turbines, well, (unless they own the land) it’s not their ground, it’s not their choice.”
USA TODAY’s Ignacio Calderon contributed data analysis.
Ramon Padilla, Karina Zaiets, Stephen J. Beard, Carlie Procell, Veronica Bravo, Josh Susong, Suhail Bhat, Javier Zarracina and Shawn J. Sullivan contributed graphics and data visualizations.
This story was produced with support from the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.
Sophie Hartley, an environment reporter with the IndyStar, part of the USA TODAY Network, can be reached at sophie.hartley@indystar.com or on X at@sophienhartley. IndyStar’s environmental reporting is made possible through the support of the nonprofit Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.
For a state-by-state analysis of wind and solar regulation across America, click here.

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