This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

George Wolff offered a cautious greeting through the window of my rented F-150. He was fresh from tending livestock, which explained the dried mud on his forehead and shirt. His boots and jeans were soiled with barnyard muck, his ballcap tipped back to cool his brow.

It was a warm, breezy May day in Wishek, North Dakota, with wind speeds hovering around 20 miles per hour, gusting to the low 30s. Angus cattle foraged on a hillside pasture behind Wolff’s barns. Two John Deere tractors sat idle off the driveway. Planting season was over, but a dry spring had slowed the arrival of this year’s wheat, corn, and soybeans.

“What can I do for you?” asked Wolff, a fourth-generation farmer. The answer was about a half mile behind him, rising above his land like an enormous pinwheel.

That 3-megawatt turbine, one of two on Wolff’s 3,500-acre property, is part of Badger Wind Farm. The 92-turbine, 250-MW project was brought online in January by the Danish energy giant Ørsted and is the newest such installation in North Dakota, which ranks ninth in the US for producing wind energy.

Badger Wind Farm is the largest economic development project in the history of Wishek, an 850-person city about 90 miles southeast of Bismarck in McIntosh County. In exchange for hosting turbines on their property, Wolff and other local farmers and landowners receive lease payments from Ørsted—and the county will see an influx of tax revenues based on the project’s annual generation.

But for many in Wishek, early optimism about the economic benefits has given way to regret and resentment, according to Larry Wald, a lifelong resident and the city’s former mayor and council member. “We used to live in open country, right?” Wald said. ​“Now, these towers are the first thing you see when you come into Wishek and the last thing you see on your way out.”

This notion—that the costs of wind power outweigh the benefits—is not unique to Wishek or McIntosh County. Large swaths of rural America are reevaluating their relationships with commercial-scale clean energy. While states such as California and Iowa are retooling their energy economies around carbon-free power, others are tapping the brakes as renewable energy development faces withering attacks from conservatives.

In North Dakota, many have soured on wind power after embracing it for most of the last 20 years as part of the state’s ​“all of the above” energy policy. Once a common thing, newly completed projects like Wishek’s Badger Wind Farm have become rare.

Anchoring a Wishek park is a 9-foot-tall concrete statue of Barney the Badger, the town mascot, with a bright blue varsity sweater emblazoned with the letter ​“W.” The statue helps explain Badger Wind Farm’s name, and is but one example of the kind of small-town charm that suffuses Wishek.

Lila Raile, another lifelong resident, is among those who feel that charm is at risk because of the wind turbines. Her recently built ​“dream home,” atop a low hill about a mile west of Wishek’s town center, is surrounded by turbines—a backdrop she never imagined just a few years ago.

“Welcome to my nightmare,” Raile said in an email before my visit to her home, which used to offer views of rolling........

© Mother Jones