Stamford town officials agreed last week to propose a 2,500-foot setback requirement in an ordinance they are creating to regulate wind-turbine installations. “It’s the strictest I’ve seen,” said Dave Groberg, director of business development for Chicago-based Invenergy, LLC, which hopes to install a line of turbines along a mountain ridge between Stamford and Roxbury. Town officials have been working on the ordinance since last year, and regulations are still in the early stages. A year-long moratorium on the wind-turbine development expires in February.

If you have ever driven off campus, you have likely noticed giant windmills looming on the horizon. Part of a system of some twenty turbines, these iron giants comprise the Fenner Windpower Project, just one component of a nationwide initiative to utilize clean and renewable energy. Operational since the fall of 2000, the mills have the capacity to power about 10,000 homes solely by harnessing the energy of the wind as it sweeps over the Adirondacks and down the Chenango Valley. Despite their efficiency, the mammoth cost to assemble just one of these turbines (about $2.5 million dollars) has stirred local and national debate over cost versus benefit at the Fenner site, not to mention the intrusions they cause for residents.

But I was sitting at my kitchen table in North Buffalo, far from the wind farms of the Southern Tier, and such distance makes for simple, black-and-white comprehension. There are places in Western New York where wind energy isn’t so clear a choice. Places with names like Perry, Sheldon and Arkwright, rural towns perched atop the high glacial ridges to the east and south of the city, whose landscapes might soon be dominated by hundreds of towering, 400-foot windmills. As wind companies eye their windswept fields and make overtures to local town boards, divisions run deeper and deeper between citizens who disagree on the merits of wind farm development in their backyards. In such locales, the gray areas of wind development come into sharp focus.

The idea of windmills brings to mind bucolic Renaissance paintings of Dutch landscapes and tulip beds. But that is hardly the experience of some who have to live next to the 400-foot electricity-generating windmills being built across America's breezy plains.