Wind takes Iowa by storm.

• Author: Lorenzsonn, Erik

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THE WINDS THAT SWEEP through central Iowa's corn and soybean fields are a powerful force--as I almost found out the hard way.

"You might want to hold on to that door," cautioned Bill Sutton, a laconic middle-aged farmer dressed in jeans and a plaid button-down, speaking to me from the driver's seat of his pickup truck. I was blithely opening the passenger door to get out after we had parked on a dirt service road in the middle of a cornfield. Next to us loomed our destination: a 400-foot-tall steel wind turbine.

His warning came too late, and my mistake almost cost me my fingers: The door slammed back at me, propelled by the roiling winds outside.

Take two: I got out more gingerly and, shirt flapping in the gusts, I walked with Sutton to the base of the behemoth before us. I stood a moment to take in the whooshing blades, the droning motor, and the vertiginous tower. It was the first time I had been this close to a wind turbine.

Sutton was giving me a tour of his brainchild, the Junction Hilltop community wind farm. A few miles down the road stood another wind farm that Sutton had a hand in developing. The two projects--the fruit of a decade's worth of planning, lobbying, financing, and pure doggedness on the part of Sutton and his partners--are the first wind farms of their kind in Iowa: utility-scale, yet locally owned. But while these two projects are unprecedented, they aren't surprising. They were developed by farmers from Iowa, a place where open-minded and entrepreneurial figures like Sutton have quietly turned their state into a leader of wind power generation.

California and Texas have more total installed wind power capacity than any other state. But the numbers show that Iowa--ranked third in total installed capacity--is an unassuming leader. Approximately 25 percent of its generated power comes from wind, more than in any other state. It also leads the country in wind-related jobs, with more than 6,000 people employed in the industry. What's more, Iowa shows no sign of lagging. In mid-May, Governor Terry Branstad announced the largest economic development investment ever in the state's history: One of the state's two utilities plans to spend $1.9 billion to construct 656 new turbines.

Because of the crisis of global climate change, the need for renewable energy has crystallized, and wind energy--a cost-effective, dependable, and scalable resource--remains at the fore of the discussion. In Sutton's concise words: "It's clean, it's reliable. It just makes a lot of sense."

To understand how Iowa got to where it is, start with those potent gales. Simply by its geography, Iowa is an ideal place to harvest the wind--something farmers have been doing since the 1880s.

"There are a lot of people who grew up, or...