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A new association featuring the two farm groups is delivering a blunt message: Nebraska needs to act now to cash in on its abundant wind resources.
"Nebraska is quickly falling behind neighboring states in wind-energy development," said former State Sen. Bob Kremer, chairman of the advisory board of the recently formed Nebraska Energy Export Association.
The Nebraska Farm Bureau, the state's largest ag group, and the Cattlemen, the state's largest livestock organization, are two major players in the association.
Nebraska ranks sixth nationally in wind potential, but only 22nd in using the resource, according to the American Wind Energy Association.
Iowa, by contrast, has climbed to second nationally in wind-power generated.
Until now, the much smaller Nebraska Farmers Union has been agriculture's most aggressive proponent of wind power in the state.
Duane Gangwish, a vice president of the Cattlemen, said it only makes sense that ag groups are represented in trying to turn around Nebraska's underperforming wind development.
A state legislative task force is currently studying the wind issue, and major legislation is expected to be introduced next year.
Ranches and farmland are where any wind farms and transmission lines will be built if Nebraska hopes to export energy to other states.
"The old saying is, ‘If you're not at the table, you're on the menu,'" Gangwish said.
"We realized, ‘Something's happening - we need to be a part of it,'" said Jessica Kolterman, who lobbies the Legislature for the Nebraska Farm Bureau.
The bureau formed a wind committee in the wake of the 2009 legislative session, reflecting the growing interest of its membership, she said.
The new wind group will hold its first press conference today at the State Capitol.
Its president is Tim Geisert, a Lincoln businessman whose family owns land near Ogallala with wind-development potential.
Its advisory board includes a handful of prominent ranchers with large land holdings; former State Sen. Roger Wehrbein; Columbus business Tony Raimondo Jr.; and Dick Endacott, head of the State Board of Educational Lands and Funds, which manages vast holdings of public land across Nebraska.
At the press conference, the new group will lay out its goals, which are expected to mix protecting landowner rights with harnessing the economic development potential of wind.
Gangwish and Kremer said one goal is to protect Nebraska ratepayers in the process of developing an ability to export wind energy.
"Poor public policy is when a few benefit and a lot of people pay for it," Gangwish said.
Nebraska leaders have looked with envy for several years on the numerous wind farms in Iowa. The Hawkeye State has been able to tap vast amounts of federal tax credits that aren't available to Nebraska, the nation's only public power state.
Nebraska legislators took initial steps last spring to remove some of the state's barriers to wind development and formed a task force to study the complex issue of how to turn the state into a major wind player.
The leader of that study, State Sen. Chris Langemeier of Schuyler, said one key issue is who would pay the estimated $20 billion needed to build the transmission lines needed to export wind power to major population centers in the East and South.
Right now, Langemeier said, Nebraska ratepayers would be on the hook for building those lines "for someone else to profit from wind energy, and I don't think that's what the ratepayers of Nebraska anticipate."
He has said he wants Nebraskans to benefit from exporting wind by placing an excise tax on such energy.
It is "intriguing," but not surprising, that the two major farm groups are now involved in the debate, said Rich Lombardi, the Nebraska lobbyist for the American Wind Energy Association, the national group for wind developers and manufacturers.
Rural areas of Nebraska could reap a windfall in jobs and land leases for wind farms, Lombardi said.
"If you're in the ag world, and you get $6,000 per turbine, per year (lease) on your property, it's the gift that keeps on giving," he said.
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