Austin attorney Craig Byram answered some common questions that landowners often ask him about wind energy:

Q: Contracts last 30-40 years. What happens if I move in 10 years?

A: "The contract burdens the land it follows so it doesn't matter who owns the land. The next owner would get both the benefit and burden of the contract."

Q: What does this do to my real estate values?

A: "We haven't had enough transactions happen yet in southeastern Minnesota to get a sense of it, but there has been a longer history of it in southwestern Minnesota and we have seen what happens out there. Many times, especially in agricultural land, the values are driven by what the production capacity of that land, and before it was a certain type of crop that produces the best value in money coming off the land. Now you get to add a second crop that doesn't really interfere with your first crop very much, but adds another layer of consistent income. So the experience is that, as long as someone isn't just psychologically against wind for some reason, that they see this additional income as a benefit that then augments the value of the land, and they are willing to pay more for it. So whether that will happen here or not is yet to be seen, but it certainly seems to be logical with the way values have been established in the past."

Q: What does this do to my taxes, my real estate taxes?

A: "The counties that we have been involved with so far, have treated the presence of a wind turbine as a commercial use. So they've defined off how many acres are actually occupied by the turbine itself and any road leading to it and they have reclassified those few acres as commercial use as opposed to agricultural use. The contracts then provide that the increased taxes that result from that are paid by the wind turbine owner, and not the landowner. So the rest of the acres that aren't being used for the turbine or the road, remain as crop land and are taxed just like they always have been."

Q: What if I have a problem with my (commercial) turbine after 15 years, who will fix it?

A: "The turbines and roads are always owned by the developer or the owner of the wind farm, not by the owner of the land. (This differs for C-BED projects.) So, all maintenance costs, everything associated with the operation of the farm, any expense related to the operation of the wind farm falls on the owner of the turbines."

Q: How can we guarantee that there will be money there if they quit working?

A: "To us, one of the most important things that we negotiate, that the developers usually don't put in right away, is a security system for knowing that there is going to be the money there to do that sort of thing (decommissioning) when the time comes. We are not relying on the companies promise that they will have money, they actually are setting up a way that the land owner can feel secure that there is going to be money there for that time when maybe they have to take these down."

There are 0 comments - Display All Comments