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Photo by Elliot J. Sutherland/The Ottawa Herald
Karen McVey and her dog, Morton, are living off the grid. McVey recently installed a wind-powered generator on her property in rural Franklin County. The generator produces an average of 400 kilowatts of electricity each month. McVey says that’s more than enough for her and her dog to live on every month.
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Homeowner capitalizes on weather with wind-powered generator
By CLEON RICKEL, Herald Senior Writer
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Most people were ducking last weekend as fierce winds whistled through Franklin County.
Karen McVey, Appanoose, was smiling.
As gusts ratcheted up into stratospheric speeds, she’d step outside and look up. Her new wind generator churned quietly in the winds, pumping electricity into her house nearly 40 feet away.
“I’ve gone out several times to look at it turn,” McVey said. “It’s very mesmerizing.”
Although it looks “very elegant,” McVey likes her generator, which was perched atop a 30-foot tower last week before the high winds whipped through the county, for other reasons.
Although McVey won’t know until she sees her next electrical bills, she said she figures the winds, which reached up to 60 miles an hour, produced enough electricity that she didn’t have to use any electricity from her utility company.
‘Small wind’McVey’s experiment with wind power also represents an experiment for Franklin County with what the American Wind Energy Association calls “small wind,” the use of small systems designed for homes, businesses and farms.
Hers is the first residential wind generator in the county.
The county planning commission literally had to write rules for wind generators as a result of her machine.
When she made her request, the county didn’t have any rules pertaining to home wind generators.
To allow her to put up a tower and generator, county planner Larry Walrod had to find a back-door method that classified her as a utility — the county has rules regarding utilities in rural areas — and the county commission issued her a special use permit.
Walrod also been scouring the state for other counties’ regulations for small-wind rules — and Walrod found few.
Size mattersPlanners are wrangling over the details of the regulations and have continued their work to this month.
The proposed regulations limiting the size of tracts that can have wind generators in rural areas have drawn opposition.
According to the proposed rules, residential wind generators would have to meet height limits and be located on tracts at least 40 acres, with one generator allowed per 40 acres for larger lots.
A homeowner would need to get a special-use permit to put a generator on tracts of 20 to 40 acres.
No generators would be allowed on lots smaller than 20 acres, according to the rules.
Opponents of the lot size restriction included a wind generator dealer from Linn County, who said towers can be safely installed on lots as small as a half-acre.
McVey said she’s skeptical of the proposed size requirements. Wind generators can be placed on smaller lots without hazard, she said.
Her generator is on a 15-acre tract.
“To put on a 40-acre limit is going to put it beyond the reach of most of the people,” McVey said.
Increasing interestAs energy prices and discussions about climate change increase, area interest in wind generators has increased.
“Ever since the first story in The Herald about my request, my phone hasn’t stopped ringing,” McVey said. “Several people have come by to look at it.”
McVey, who has been working on installing the generator for about two years, bought her rig from a Topeka dealer, who told her she was the second buyer.
Since then, he’s been flooded with customers, she said.
McVey’s generator and tower cost about $14,000. However, that included some special construction because of the limestone that underlies most of her land, she said. The tower, which was built in an area that had the least amount of rock, is freestanding and has no guy wires.
McVey, a special education teacher for Marais des Cygnes Valley schools, said she became determined to get “off the grid” — become independent of outside energy sources — and to lower her “carbon footprint” — her use of carbon dioxide-creating energy — as much as possible based on her experience as a speech therapist in Hawaii and St. Croix in the Virgin Islands.
“It was very striking what I learned about living on an island,” she said.
All fuel and energy, most food and supplies had to be shipped from the outside and residents had to be careful with their consumption, she said.
She began studying the subject of living off the grid and decided she wanted to return to Kansas in search of a site that would have enough wind for a generator.
McVey considered using solar power, but she said the cost of solar cells makes it twice as expensive for solar power to generate the same amount of electricity as wind.
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