“Communities will Change this World” – Rich Vanderveen on Developing Wind, Collaboration, and Cooperation

The largest wind facility in Michigan is just a few miles from my home in the state’s mid-section.  The man behind it is Rich Vanderveen.

Vanderveen is legendary among midwestern wind power developers, in that he has been a leader in bringing communities, citizens, manufacturers, and utilities into a “21st century way to think about how we make and use energy”.  Skip to the 2 minute mark of the video if you are pressed for time.

Michigan Land Use Institute:

BRECKENRIDGE, Mich.—Two months after Michigan’s largest wind farm kicked into high gear, local support remains strong for the 133-turbine, 212-megawatt Gratiot County Wind Project, which literally surrounds this small, mid-Michigan farming town.

The project spreads across four townships and 30,000 acres of tabletop-flat farmland in Gratiot’s windy northeast corner. A drive along the area’s main highway, M-46, reveals that the turbines have dramatically changed this farming community’s landscape: The big machines seem to be everywhere.

But local business people say that while they hear some complaints from their customers about the nearly 500-foot-tall machines, most seem glad to see them in place. They like the local wealth and clean energy it generates on breezy days. Local officials say they largely hear the same thing.

This November, if Michigan voters approve the popular “25 x 25” clean energy ballot initiative,  which requires 25 percent renewable energy by 2025, other windy farm communities could be vying for their own utility-scale windpower development.

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According to Mr. Vander Veen, getting Gratiot’s residents to trust his company, Wind Resource LLC, required a slow, yet simple process: talking to lots of people. He often jokes that it took “about 50 cups of coffee per megawatt” as he chatted in kitchens and local restaurants with people who wanted to know more about his proposal.

“We worked with some of the largest families in the community who then put us in touch with their own, personal networks, and those people then did the same thing,” he explained. “So, you end up respecting everybody.”

The developer then attended community meetings where people were encouraged to ask questions, raise objections, and learn as much as possible. They included sessions with Future Farmers of America members; educators; local, state and federal officials; MSU Cooperative Extension staff; and Michigan Farm Bureau members and officials.

“We did a listening tour, finding out what peoples’ values are,” he said. “It’s important to remember that we are invited guests, and we can’t impose anything.

“That is why we chose the co-operative, community participation model,” he added, referring to both the open-ended way he communicated and the leasing arrangement he offered. Everyone who signed up received payment, whether or not a turbine landed on their property.

“As I said in my TEDx talk in Marquette, we were trying to contrast our approach with that of a utility trying to impose, say, a Texas approach,” he explained, “where it’s just a few very large landowners, instead of a lot of small ones, like in Michigan. If you start by deciding what you’re going to do and then just defending it, it doesn’t get you very far.”

Or, as he told Midwest Energy News recently, “We know that you don’t just get consensus; you have to earn it.”

Vanderveen’s approach compares well with the model pioneered by the world’s most successful wind powered nation, Denmark.

But there’s also a fundamental dimension to Denmark’s energy transition: How is it possible to whisk such an initiative through parliament, the courts and company boardrooms in a way that makes the population see its advantages rather than growing weary of it? How do you plant a major technological innovation in people’s minds, and how do you distribute it to the electrical outlets of an entire country?

It’s the challenge of an entire generation and a race against time: Whoever first manages to tame the wind is guaranteed prosperity and power. “Why do you think the Chinese president recently visited Denmark?” Stiesdal asks.

Indeed, even without its wind-power success story, political scientists have long viewed Denmark as a model state. Perhaps the most striking expression of this was coined by Francis Fukuyama in his most recent work “The Origins of Political Order,” when he talked about the idea of “getting to Denmark.” For the Stanford professor, who became world-famous with his 1992 proclamation of the “end of history,” the Scandinavian country is “a mythical place” known for its outstanding political and economic institutions. “It is stable, democratic, peaceful, prosperous, inclusive and has extremely low levels of political corruption,” he writes.

Fukuyama presents Denmark as a “miracle of modern politics,” as a point of orientation for all failed and faltering states in this world. Likewise, he postulates a kind of tripartite recipe for successful governance. This requires an effective administration, a transparent justice system and a government that is accountable to its citizens at all times.

Of course there is always something or other rotten in the state of Denmark, making this famous line from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” an oft-cited metaphor in political commentaries on this nation of 5.6 million people. And, of course, even Denmark cannot isolate itself from the forces that undermine parliamentary democracies elsewhere. But, in international rankings, the Danes regularly take top positions not only in terms of quality of life, competitiveness, combating corruption and the satisfaction of its citizens, but also with regard to the quality of its politicians.

Germany’s Bertelsmann Stiftung, for instance, recently came to the following conclusion in its latest comparison of sustainable politics in over 100 countries: “The general level of public trust in government and public administration is high.” When it came to political management (“very convincing”), it rated Denmark in third place, eight places ahead of Germany and 22 ahead of France. It said that governmental action in Copenhagen is extraordinarily “credible and transparent.”