Wind speed.

• Author: Williams, Allison
• Position: PICTURE THIS

It's prime time for Amazon's turbines near the coast. But the state's first big wind farm may be its last.

Turbine blades the length of four shipping containers smoothly slice the air nearly 500 feet above this corner of northeastern North Carolina, but the building of the state's wind industry has been anything but peaceful.

Craig Poff, the Philadelphia developer who spent nearly a decade assembling 22,000 acres across Perquimans and Pasquotank counties for the largest wind farm in the Southeast, says it's unlikely he will be back for a second project. That was before 10 state legislators sent a letter to federal authorities seeking to shut down the site and the region's congressman, Walter Jones, pushed for a curb on similar developments.

Wind power is sweeping the United States--the U.S. Department of Labor predicts that wind-farm technician will be America's fastest-growing occupation during the next decade--but it's unclear which way it will blow in North Carolina.

As politicians attempt to apply the brakes, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is opening the door for offshore projects. It will auction 191 square miles of the Atlantic Ocean off Kitty Hawk this month. Six prior wind-lease sales in other parts of the country have generated $58 million for more than 1 million acres in federal waters.

Poff began making trips in 2009 from his home in Pennsylvania to a part of North Carolina so remote locals call it The Desert. The northern tip of the Outer Banks is about 40 miles away as the crow flies, but there are few direct roads to reach it, just a stark, beautiful landscape of mostly farmland stretching for miles. Wind farms, however, weren't possible here until changing technology brought taller towers with longer blades able to reach higher, stronger winds. Poff, who has been vacationing for years in North Carolina, began scouting the state's northeastern corner for his employer, Avangrid Renewables, the second-largest developer of wind projects in the U.S. and a subsidiary of Bilbao, Spain-based utility Iberdrola SA. Avangrid found a partner in e-commerce giant Amazon. Now, Amazon's $400 million 208-megawatt farm is expected to generate enough energy to power 61,000 homes, offsetting the electricity-hungry server farms driving Amazon's $12 billion cloud-computing business.

Outside Hertford, a town of about 2,000, 104 turbines as tall as PNC Plaza in downtown Raleigh rise from the cornstalks and soybean sprouts that farmers...