Pete Ferrell
speaker
120 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Pete Ferrell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So my argument has been, you know, we're going to lose a little bit of ground, but the benefit, in my opinion, far outseeds what that is, what that loss is. So now I can't remember your question. Okay.
They lease in order to put the hardware on the land. The easement has to do with the wind. It simply says... I cannot construct anything that's going to impair the wind flow that approaches those turbines. So I can't build any tall buildings. I can't put up any tree breaks. I can't do anything that would impair the wind, of course. I mean, I can't imagine what I would do out here.
This is a, you know, a vast treeless prairie. So the easement issue is almost a non-issue. But that's the easement portion of the lease. It's a lease and easement agreement.
Well, you probably don't have coffee shops in your area like we do here where people get together and chat. You know, this thing got pretty controversial, and I'm deciding I'll keep a low profile here. But one day I go to the local saloon, and I just want to get my hamburger and eat and get out of there because I don't really want to answer any questions.
And one of my ornery neighbors, who actually is a good friend, but he wanted to put me on the spot, and he goes, hey, Pete. And of course, everybody looks up, you know, there's a dozen cowboys in there. I hear when you build that damn wind farm, there ain't going to be a breath of air in Beaumont because you're going to stop all the wind from blowing to Beaumont.
You're going to have to buy all of us a clothes dryer because we ain't going to be able to dry our clothes up there. And so, you know, that's the kind of thing that I encountered. And, of course, unfortunately, some of those folks may have believed him. You know, they might have thought, well, wait a minute, is Pete going to stop the wave? Sure.
You know, and so that's how those kind of things get going. And now that it's done, a lot of the people that were concerned about it are kind of like slapping their foreheads and saying, well, what was all the fuss? You know, you're right, you know. Cause it has, it has not.
Well, the Kansas legislature gave property tax abatement back in the 70s that they were envisioning that renewable energy would happen here. So the wind farms don't pay property tax anymore. Now, they do pay something known as a pilot, let's see, payment in lieu of taxes as part of their agreement when they get a county permit, because they know they are going to have to provide, you know, fire.
They're going to have to provide EMS services. They're going to have to. In fact, the roads may need extra maintenance. And so most developers voluntarily pay extra into the county coffers because of the extra cost to the county of the wind farm. That's what happened here, and that's what happened throughout Kansas.
Now, I don't know if they abated the property tax in Iowa, but by the way, they do pay. They don't pay for the machines. They don't pay property tax on the machines, but the ranch… Where the wind farm exists did change from agricultural to commercial property, and they do pay tax there.
So there is some tax money going to the county, but they upped the ante big there because, well, they wanted the county's support, and they got it.
Great question. I'm actually not going to talk about my lease because we were so early in the game, nothing was standardized at that point in time. So I've got kind of a one-off agreement that's a unicorn. But when I started working in western Kansas, there was a standardization process, and I should have written it down, Tanner, but the first thing that will happen is there will be typically –
three levels of payment, and it'll be the greater of. So when a developer approaches a farmer or rancher, he has no idea where those turbines are going to go. So the first thing you'll probably be offered is if you sign up, you'll get X amount per acre no matter what, okay? Then the next thing will be there will be a – A nameplate turbine size that may or may not come on your land.
And in my case, it's a 1.5. They're going to offer a base rate regardless of what that turbine generates based on that nameplate size. And then the top level will be, okay, just like with oil, it's going to be production times price. So you'll be offered a royalty.
And all those three, those three levels of payment will be baked in, and it will typically say you get the greater of these in your lease payment. So that's kind of, I've described the general, and this is from what I've seen both consulting other farmers and ranchers. This is what we offered in Western Kansas in the project I worked on out there. was three levels and you get the greater up.
Great question. And, you know, I was talking about this incredible investment. I knew going in that this developer who leases the Farrell Ranch, I knew that the turbines had a 20 year lifespan. It had a 20 year warranty, literally. And so that's coming up. And I also knew that their power purchase agreement was going to expire in 20 years.
The great thing about wind and the reason that the developers, the utilities like it is there is no question about the price. There is a question about how many kilowatt hours are going to come in, but they love knowing a fixed price. Imagine this, if we can get a fixed price for 20 years, well, utilities really like wind power for that reason. So all of that is coming to an end.
And to answer your question, I've already been approached about extending this agreement because in order for them to go on, they've either got to keep these machines going. And Tanner, I'm going to back up just a moment. Do you remember I said that that first company walked away in 98? Well, one of the reasons they walked away was the inefficiency of the machines at that time.
And the efficiency of the machines keeps getting better, just like everything in our world having to do with electronics. I mean, think about what you're doing with your GPS-controlled tractors now that you couldn't do 20 years ago. Well, that evolution of electronics has occurred in turbine technology. And so each generation of turbine is getting more and more efficient.
You know, wheat farmers in Kansas... They want to extract from horizontal acres. A wind farmer is interested in vertical acres. And so the bigger the wingspan, the propeller span that they have, the more energy they can collect. And so...
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