When you drive across parts of rural Michigan now, you’re greeted with a new, incredible eyesore. As far as the eye can see, electric windmills towering over the horizon. Sometimes turning in the wind, sometimes still, but always impossible to ignore.
Let’s ignore the debate over green electricity and climate change for a second. We can all agree that rural windmills are, by far, the ugliest source of power generation there is.
For one thing, they dominate the skyline across larger swathes of territory than anything else. Coal plants may be ugly, solar panels may take up lots of land, but they don’t stand hundreds of feet in the sky for miles and miles. They don’t visually dominate entire regions.
The placement of windmills in rural areas, as well, is particularly offensive. They tower over the beautiful, pastoral stretches of the state. Idyllic farmhouses, big red barns, cows out to pasture, and windmills looming right outside their windows.
Maybe some farmers are happy to lease their land for electric windmills, but surely others despise them. Imagine having to see one spin (or not) outside your window every day, impossible to ignore.
Country living is marked by its stillness, isolation, quietude. Many seek it out for this reason. Windmills are the opposite, always moving, turning, generating. They are a direct affront to the peaceable nature of country life.
Maybe if they looked like the old Dutch windmills, they’d fit into rural environments. Instead, their designers made them as futuristic, technological, and anti-rural as possible. Bright white, curved lines, thin and metallic. Purely cost effective and efficient, and built in China, of course. They look terribly out of place.
Even worse, the human eye finds anything moving impossible to ignore. You notice this on road trips in particular, the spinning blades of wind turbines constantly drawing your attention. When you leave a windmill zone, you breathe a sigh of relief, removed from the visual oppression.
Windmill-free zones, however, are becoming far and few between. With Gov. Whitmer’s green energy bill mandating 50% renewable energy by 2030, and 100% by 2040, more and more areas of the state will be taken over by windmills.
Michigan currently has over 1,600 operational wind turbines. Collectively, these generate nearly 4000 MW of power, roughly 8% of the state’s total power needs. With Whitmer’s green energy targets, that will increase to over 60%.
That means a whole hell of a lot more windmills—8,000 of them in total.
Why the fixation on windmills, instead of other renewable energy methods? Sure, there are arguments for efficiency, safety, whatever. But in my opinion, the aesthetics of wind turbines aren’t incidental—they’re a primary motivation.
If we dig deeper into the psychology of the green-energy crowd, the eyesore is a feature, not a bug. It’s the same as those wretched paper straws or mandating reusable grocery bags. It forces you to accept the alteration of your physical space, a constant reminder of climate-change narratives and, by proxy, those who have the power to control them.
Every time you see a windmill, you’re seeing the visual domination of your space by the state government, and the green energy crowd that currently runs the show. Their towering height isn’t just to catch the wind, it’s an optical manifestation of power.
Building wind turbines in rural areas isn’t accidental, either. Sure, there’s more wind across the farmlands, but even more importantly, those areas tend to vote red. It kills two birds with one stone, in a way. Lucrative green-energy contracts and destroying the feng shui of opposing voters’ backyards.
We can fairly condemn the wind turbines for no other reason than their visual offensiveness, because the aesthetics of public space are a valid debate. The sky belongs to everyone, in a way, and we deserve a say in the shapes and forms that dot our horizon.
Bobby Mars is art director of Michigan Enjoyer. Follow him on X @bobby_on_mars.
