I am wondering when setting up a wind farm is it more feasable to lease your land to a wind developer or to try and do it yourself? My family has a 180 farm in central mn and the wind always seems to be blowing up there. The land sits idle right now used for mainly atvs. We would like to do something that is good for the comunity and that would help are farm now and more importantly in the future. If doing it yourself is the best way would the turbine(s)produce enough to cover the loan payments and other expences that we would incur. Thank you for your time and valuable input.

Hi What About Wind,

Thanks for posting to the network. Your question is a bit more complex that I bet you imagined, but I'll try to give you a good idea of your options.

Leasing your land to a developer and putting up your own turbine both have pluses and minuses.

Leasing your land to a developer is much lower risk, takes several orders of magnitude less work, and requires much less investment (if any) up front. However, if a developer is not already interested in your land, it's fairly unlikely you'd be able to find one who will develop your land. (The way the industry works is that the developers approach landowners after they've identified a promising location.)

There are many examples of folks putting together their own wind projects, but this is a much higher risk (and higher reward) task. You'd need to be prepared to spend 3-5 years working at least 20 hours a week, and to invest a substantial amount of your own money.

If developing your own project is something that interests you, I'd suggest checking out Windustry's Community Wind Toolbox ( http://www.windustry.org/CommunityWindToolbox).
There's too much to cover in this reply, but the Toolbox does a good job of explaining the process.

Good luck!

Marin Byrne