Yes, I was reading the letters to the editor in the Hays paper. You would think that you had picked up a San Francisco paper. Those people lost their minds. It was a case, that if I cant have it, then nobody is going to have it.
In both cases, it was wackos from Lawrence and Topeka who put a stop to both projects.
There was another factor in the Ellis Co. wind farm that didn’t get much publicity. Most of the opponents were fairly well-to-do types that had built homes near the proposed site of the wind farm. They got the land cheap because it’s worthless rocks and hills with very little water, can’t be farmed and isn’t even fit to raise cattle on. They made all sorts of outrageous and slanderous claims about the company which was based in Spain, trying to make people think the electricity would be exported (to Spain!), and the landowners who would profit from allowing turbines on their land. The NIMBYs finally got to one county commissioner who vetoed the project, but it still may be back.
The funniest thing was when the lead NIMBY wrote a letter calling the editor of the paper a “Fascist”, when the editor is a typical MSM leftie, who allowed the same NIMBY to run a letter in the paper almost every day, personally trashing the landowners with crude insults and accusations of criminality.