Private Landowners, Public Policy, and the Energy Revolution - closup

00:01: Alright, I'll go ahead and get started. Good morning. Whether you are a member of the Ford School community or coming here from across campus or beyond, welcome. My name is Sarah Mills, and I am a lecturer here in the Ford School, and also... [chuckle] thanks. And also a Project Manager in CLOSUP, which is our center for local state and urban policy. And today's event actually spans both of those roles, because it's part of our CLOSUP in the classroom initiative, which is trying to get students actively engaged in the work that we're doing, the research that we're doing in the center. As a result, some of those in the audience are taking my class right now, Energy and Environmental Policy Research, which is a seminar for Ford School BAs.

00:47: But today's event is also the first in a new series of CLOSUP activities that we'll be doing, highlighting exciting advancements in renewable energy policy. In particular, we'll be highlighting policies and policy research that's at the sub-federal level. So, at the state and local level. This series is made possible through the Ford School Renewable Energy Support Fund, which was seeded by a generous donation from Dennis and Nancy Meaney. And I also want to acknowledge the co-sponsors for today's event, which are the Energy Institute, Environmental Law and Policy Program, the Graham Sustainability Institute, the Program in the Environment and the School for Environment and Sustainability.

01:36: So, for this first event in the CLOSUP renewable energy series, we're delighted to have Jeffrey Jacquet here, who is an assistant professor of Rural Sociology at Ohio State. Don't hold his employer against him. Where his research focuses on the local impacts of energy development. While I'd read his work before, I'd had an opportunity to first meet him this summer when he co-organized and hosted in Columbus, the first Energy Impacts Conference, which was an opportunity for social science researchers who were working on energy issues to meet and exchange ideas. Most of the folks there were researching the impacts of and local policy responses to either wind energy development or fracking. And both of these are topics that Jeffrey's looked at extensively. And they also happen both to be topics that we've worked on in CLOSUP.

02:33: Much of Jeffrey's work has focused on the impact that energy development practices have on individuals living in communities with, for example, and what I think he'll talk a lot about today is wind turbines. To some extent, these practices have been shaped by state and local policies encouraging wind development in particular places or incentivizing the use of particular practices. But what I'm particularly intrigued by is Jeffrey's research, which shows that wind farms may by their very scale, alter one of the traditional roles of government. Which is to serve as a broker between the power plant operator and the community. I'm gonna leave that to Jeffrey though to explain how that may be the case. And so please join me in welcoming Jeffrey Jacquet.

[applause]

03:22: Thanks everybody. Thanks for the invitation to be here. I think this is the point in the talk where I make a joke about football, being from Ohio State. But I actually grew up in Wisconsin. I grew up a Badgers fan. I grew up rooting for University of Michigan and Ohio State to lose. So I guess maybe, skip the football jokes. So I just wanted to just really briefly talk about trends in wind and shale development. From my perspective, wind and shale are really similar in a lot of ways, especially the development in the relationship that they have with local state government, regulatory policy and talk about energy policy in the way that government and property owners play into that. And then just talk about three similar research projects that look at property owners and local government.

04:29: And I think the property ownership thing is something I've really been interested in recently. With both wind and shale, you can't, at least in the eastern US, in most parts of the US, you can't do shale, you can't do wind unless you have a property owner willing to partner with you. In most cases, more than just one property owner you need. You need a bunch. So, I think if you're in this room, you probably don't really need an introduction on the energy transformations in the United States. Just really quickly, you'll breeze through these new technologies, increased price of energy, new environmental public policy priorities have resulted in lots of new energy happening in the United States. Lots of new locations of energy. Lots of new different types of ownership of energy. And lots of new impacts on environmental social economic resources all across the country. Just sort of a generic map of wind energy potential. Lots of blue on the map. And just maybe hold this image for later. Lots of wind energy potential, and we've had lots of wind energy development in the past decade. Still continues to increase. I think we're getting close to 50,000 wind turbines in the United States. I think it's more install capacity anywhere else in the world, 82,000 megawatts.

06:07: It continues to grow, at least in the next few years. If you wanna know where the wind turbines are, there's a really cool map, sort of a interactive GIS application. You can check it out. But these are wind farms. Each dot is a wind farm made up of how many wind turbines, and a lot of wind development all over the country. Although the distribution of these dots don't really seem to be sort of even. Some clusters here of wind, which is interesting to me, and we'll return to that in research project number three. Shale energy, similar story. Lots of shale development happening all over the country. This one, unlike... Or I should say, like wind the resource is not necessarily evenly distributed. But where there is a lot of shale resource, there's been a lot of development in most places. Maybe Michigan might be somewhat of an exception that there seems to be a lot of resource there but not quite enough development or not a lot of development yet. But we'll see how these other plays sort of play out when it comes to Michigan's turn.

07:37: Just looking at oil supply in the United States is growing. Oil demand in the United States is declining. We've become third in the world in oil production, projected to be second pretty soon in the next few years. There's lots of charts that show oil production and shale gas production, and they both are growing pretty precipitously. Okay, so shapers in energy development, it's just trying to put together a conceptual diagram of how energy, sort of the institutions and the roles of different players in shaping energy development. Of course, you have energy policy and regulation. United States are three levels: Federal level, state level, local level. You have the energy industry itself, which is really complicated depending on if you're talking about wind or shale or another type of energy source. Then you have private property owners. And then you have all sorts of other stuff going on like energy prices, the geology. You have transportation, transmission lines. You have community attributes. You have all sorts of different things going on. And it's a really complicated model thinking about impacts from energy in the scope and scale of energy development. But just wanted to focus on these three larger institutions, you might call them, shaping energy.

09:21: So we have policy and regulation, the energy industry itself, and private property owners. And I guess I'm today, at least talking about the overlap between policy regulation and private property owners. Thinking about policy at the federal level, I think it's fair to say that federal policies have been pretty pro-industry. Federal regulation towards shale has been largely sort of hands-off. Shale industry can sort of do what it needs to do. Regulation for shale has been largely left up to the states. Federal regulation towards wind has been primarily in the form of the production tax credit. Production tax credit has been digging in. And thinking about this, it's interesting because it's... The way the tax credit is set up, it's really only an incentive for organizations that pay lots of taxes. If you pay lots of taxes, then the production tax credit becomes really attractive to you. But if you don't pay taxes, if you're a university, for example, or you're non-profit or you're a municipality or you're a church or whatever it might be, or if you're an individual or maybe a small group of individuals, you're probably not paying enough taxes to make the production tax credit worth it. And so, it really incentivizes wind for really large corporate organizations, which are the organizations that are best suited to take advantage of this incentive.

11:02: We'll come back to that. At the state level, the federal government I think has been taking this hands-off approach and meanwhile the states have been exempting regulation of oil and gas, which means that the states have been saying to local municipalities, "You don't have the authority to regulate oil and gas. That authority rests with us at the state level." And what's interesting about wind is that wind is sort of moving in the same direction. There's been a lot of states that have moved to regulate wind energy in a similar way as oil and gas development with this preemption model. In the US, we have this legacy, this ideology of home rule of that municipalities can zone, can regulate the activities that go on in their municipality. If you wanna site a car wash or a factory or a power plant or whatever it is, it has to go through the local municipalities, through the Planning and Zoning Board. You have to have public meetings and hearings and so on, but with energy, with oil and gas, and increasingly with wind, you don't have to do that at the local level.

12:21: The regulation is pre-empted. The rationale for that is... I think there's a number of rationales... This idea of keeping regulation uniform across the states. You don't have this patchwork of different municipalities allowing or not allowing energy. There's this idea that local governments might not be best suited to regulate energy development. It's complex, it's highly technical, there's lots of environmental risk involved and so on. And also it can help streamline the process for developers. Arguably, I think, energy developers would presumably like to see energy development regulated consistently across the state. And it sorta removes one layer of potential regulation or one obstacle towards development. So local is not really a huge player. It is for wind. It can be for wind, but increasing at least at the national level, that has been moving towards preemption. The state is heavily involved, the federal government, not as much, but then you have private property owners.

13:45: I guess, what I'd mentioned before on getting into private property owners... So I think in the planning world, there's been a lot of research on the value of public participation. And public participation has become, I think, one of the biggest factors, biggest attributes, criterion for public planning at especially the local level. You need to get people involved, you need to have public participation in multiple steps along the way, get people involved early, keep them involved with the benefits being that's... I guess, a number of benefits. One is that your planning process might be more effective. Local people have certain knowledge and might actually know what is best for your community, but then also people tend to be happier with the outcome knowing that they had opportunities to participate along the way. And so they tend to be more accepting of what it is that is the result of the planning process, but with energy, especially with shale and also increasingly with wind, you don't have those opportunities to participate at the local level. People are sort of... Tends not to be local Planning Zoning meetings or local hearings on the issue.

15:13: And so you're taking away this avenue for public participation, which at least, in the planning world, there's lots of research showing that it's important. So, enter these private landowners, for wind and shale, both wind and shale, they have this leasing system. So you need this large landscape of land for either shale or for wind. That large landscape will be owned by many different people, sort of patchwork or tapestry of different landowners. And you need to get them all onboard and actually sign legal documents, sign leases with these landowners. And so this offers a different avenue for a different relationship between these large industries and the local communities where they're sited. And so this lease that wind farms and shale developers sign with the landowners, they're legally binding agreements, typically five or 10 years in duration if no energy is produced. If energy is produced, then the lease is held in perpetuity, or the lease dictates the lease payment for the acreage, and then it also dictates the royalty payments if it's developed. And so they're sorta regulatory instruments, but they're at the landowner scale. And so they look like this, actually look more like this, and so have all sorts of different clauses in there.

16:58: And what's interesting is the landowners in theory could negotiate for whatever they want. They could negotiate for environmental protections on their property. They could negotiate for additional compensation. They could negotiate for even wider benefits for the community if they are organized to do that. I think, lots of times, what we see is landowners aren't necessarily negotiating for the full suite of concessions that they might be able to, whether they sign what is offered to them by the energy company, or maybe they'll get an attorney, but it's actually a very powerful piece of regulation, but it's done at the property owner scale. But what's interesting is, the lease is not just royalty rates, and it's not just lease payments, but it's actually involves a pretty intimate, lengthy discussion. You have a land-man or a land-women who might show up at your front door, might talk to you at your kitchen table, might give you their personal cellphone number, email address, say, "Hey, if you have any problems, any questions, you can call me at, you can send me a text," and they'll probably be really responsive to the land owner.

18:17: If they do indeed have questions and thinking about this is that it's actually... It's an opportunity to sort of participate in the planning of the energy development. Except it's one on one participation. It's actually really intimate type of participation that a lot of people don't have the opportunity to engage in, whether it's in a public process or especially if they're not a land owner.

18:51: So this brings me to research project number one, looking at land owner attitudes in Northern Pennsylvania. Looking at how do attitudes change, how do attitudes change if they're a land owner, if they have a lease or if they have leasing and the actual development on their property. And picked the site in Northern Pennsylvania because there's a rather large wind farm that is being constructed and also tons of shale gas drilling going at in the same place. And so, this is in Northern Pennsylvania, these red circles are wind turbines, and then the black sort of starry circles are shale wells. And what we did is we did basically a census for all landowners in the green area, and did a random selection of landowners in the beige area, received a 58% response rate, had about a thousand surveys back. This is in 2011. So if they had no lease or development for the natural gas, tended to be much more pessimistic about energy development.

20:00: If they had a lease only but no actual wells drilled, they tended to be ambivalent or of mixed minds, but if they had the lease and the well on their property, they tended to be much more optimistic about... Tended to have a much more positive attitude towards natural gas. For the wind farm, the attitudes weren't quite as disparate, but similar trends going on. If you had a lease, you tended to be more positive. If you had a lease and a winter vine, you tended to be much more positive. And What explains this? What's going on? What are these... Why do get progressively higher levels more positive attitudes? You could certainly point to the compensation, so idea is that if they have a lease, they're getting some money from the developer for the lease payments. If they have a lease and development, then they're getting potentially significantly more money that might lead to positive attitudes.

21:03: However if we ask them, how informed do you feel about the planning and citing process for the energy source? It turns out that for gas drilling, if they have a lease or if they have a lease in a well, they are less likely to feel uninformed, same for the wind farm, and much more likely to feel informed or very informed. So, it could be the money, but it could also be that they actually feel like they've been part of the planning process, which all their planning literature seems to suggest is really important. If you've been given enough opportunity to participate, you can see that the no opportunity people are highest amongst no lease or well, no lease or turbine. And then, the highest... Enough or more than enough opportunity tends to be highest amongst the lease in the well. So if you do some multiple regression, just having a lease and having a well explain some of the variation, but it turns out that this feeling informed opportunity for participation explains more of the variation than just having that on your property.

22:16: Same thing for the wind farm, which at least there was a suggestion there that the private participation... Participation in the process, but the participation is occurring outside the public sphere outside of local municipality. That these folks are sort of participating and they're feeling informed and they're feeling like they're getting the benefits participation, but it's private through private negotiations. And I guess raises all sorts of different questions with the rise of this idea of private participation, only certain people are allowed to participate. It's not open to all, it's only open to landowners and it's occurring outside the public sphere, and there's this lots of opportunities for landowners to negotiate for all sorts of things, but it doesn't necessarily appear that they are negotiating for all sorts of things tend to be just negotiating for money or for concessions on their personal property. There's the potential for it to be exacerbating that has versus the has not, these situations where you have these landowners or are the landowners and or they have at least some level of economic resources and tend to be giving even more whereas people who don't own land can't participate in this process. And there's been some research that other folks have done.

24:00: On sort of the idea of private participation. One in Pennsylvania, New York looking at people who leased and who had development on the property. So similar findings to what we found in our study that the more interactions they had with the energy company, the more they feel like they had participation. This ended up in an article, which is in Society and Natural Resources, if people are interested.

24:31: So, another one, looking at wind farm ownership in South Dakota and Minnesota. This was... My previous institution before I was at Ohio State. I was four years at South Dakota State University in Brookings, and there's all sorts of wind development going on around there. It was interesting because there was sort of a diversity of different ownership structures for the wind farms. We had big multinational companies coming in, we had municipally owned wind farms, we had electrical cooperatives, we had community owned wind farms and trying... It sort of offered this natural, almost experiments to look at how this ownership structures might be affecting the impacts on the community and the ways that people sort of think about these energy developments and attitudes towards the wind farms. We did some qualitative research, did some interviews in these four places in the Greater Brookings, South Dakota region.

25:42: I guess, here's Brookings right there... But... Lot's of wind, I guess the arrow's pointing towards the twin cities there to sort of orientate you where you are. There was the Wessington Springs and the Prairie Winds Wind Farms. So this one right here was... Is built by NextEra, sort of a large corporation. And then this one here is owned by the Basin Electric Cooperative, which is a really large electrical cooperative, mostly in the Great Plains and the West. And then, in Minnesota, there's a municipally-owned wind farm. So these winds... These turbines were owned by the Minnesota Municipal Power Authority, which is this, I guess, coalition of municipalities that have purchasing agreements.

26:37: What's interesting and ironic about this is that Blooming Prairie, which is the town nearby is not part of the Minnesota Municipal Power Authority. Of all the places they could have sited the turbine, this turbine they sited the wind farm next to a town that wasn't part of the Municipal Power Authority. But it's one of the, if not, the largest municipally owned wind projects in the United States. And then we had the city of Lake Benton, had a bunch of wind turbines that were first built by Enron in the early '90s, and it was one of the first wind farms ever built, modern wind farms of sort of the modern construction style. They had lots of wind tourists and they had wind farm days, sort of the town festival, they have a museum in the town hall. It was... It's really sort of become part of their identity in Lake Benton. So they've... There's... In the Buffalo Ridgewood Farm, there's 125 wind turbines, and then there's a couple of other wind farms that have been built since then. We have this corporate ownership of all these turbines and then there's this other project, which was actually a community-owned wind farm, where 120 local residents pulled their money together to buy 12, 2.5 megawatt turbines, which is fairly unprecedented. I think there's only a couple cases of this in the country.

28:13: Our methods, we're doing interviews, looking at sort of what people know about the ownership structures, how much the ownership structures seem to make, to influence the impacts to the community during the development process, how does it seem to impact people's attitudes towards wind energy, using this paper on Biofuels by Carmen Bain, sort of as the framework for our research project, did 32 interviews in these communities, basically, 10 or a dozen in each one of the towns. Basically, the summary of our findings is that the ownership structure didn't matter at all. People had no idea who owned the wind farm, really, or they might know, based on electric, where they are headquartered, I'm not really sure. The ownership structure, the wind farms, basically were perceived as sort of non-local actors coming in the community, building the wind farm, and then leaving. Most of the employees, the people doing the maintenance, were sort of regional, they weren't located near the town. They didn't know who the employees were, they didn't really have any interaction with the employees, and so it was just basically, someone else built that in our town, and they're not from here, they're not part of the community.

29:45: I think that its interesting with the wind energy industry does tend to be pretty regional, or even national, when you're talking about the employees. It's unlikely that, even if you have a wind farm in your community, that folks are necessarily going to be local members. Just because the maintenance crews, the production crews tend to be regional. And so, the cooperative municipal corporate people who saw them, sort of as outsiders in the community except for Community Wind North which was the community owned wind farm. People saw this completely differently.

30:28: So, the process that they went through to get this community wind farm is, would take a long time to explain. But basically, they put together these board of directors. They applied for money. They negotiated a power purchase agreement with the transmission line company. It's really savvy folks that had put this together. Tons of social capital, tons of, I guess, human capital, in terms of just the ability to negotiate and to work through this project. So, they have these board of directors and they have public meetings. They have a newsletter. But, they also had 150 local residents. I think it was 120, but, either way, it's a lot, especially for a small town. And they each invested $23,000 a piece. So each of these 120 local residents had to put $8,000 upfront, which was 100% at risk during certain parts of the project. And they knew it was at risk, whereas, if the project failed, they lost their money.

31:40: And then, they had to put an additional $15,000 in a CD that wasn't at risk, where if the project failed they'd get their money back. But this in and of itself is really astonishing to me. I heard stories of people cashing out their retirement funds, borrowing money from family members, selling businesses, selling equipment to get the money to, basically, buy into this community owned wind farm. And so, they partnered with Edison Renewable Energy, which is a large energy company. And this was important because Edison could get the tax credit, the production tax credit, basically, in exchange for putting up money to raise the funds needed to buy these wind turbines 'cause even though these residents put up all this money, it's still not nearly enough funds to buy 12 2.5 Megawatt wind turbines. So the project, the structure of it is really complicated but Edison owns 99% of the project for the first 10 years. And then, after that, the ownership switches. So, Edison owns 20% and then the investors own 80%. But even after... In these first 10 years, 1% ownership has been meaning between $2,000 and $4,000 a year for these local investors. I think by now they've pretty much made their money back and still have 20 or 30 years left of production.

33:15: And so, once that ownership flips, then, presumably, the amount of money that they'll receive will go up pretty substantially. There's lots of other considerations like the insurance on a wind turbine after 10 years, also goes up a lot. There's maintenance costs and all sorts of complicating mitigating factors. But it's an interesting model. And so, doing interviews with folks there, people really felt like even if they weren't members of this group, they felt like they owned this thing, like this was a community owned project. Our friends own this wind farm. The community owns this wind farm. And a lot of it is probably driven by place, driven by the fact that Enron had been building turbines in the 90s, that they had this really long history of wind energy. It must be a good investment if these companies keep coming here to build more of them. How many places could this project have happened? I'm not sure. Just because that 20 years of history really seemed to make a difference. And so, the benefits of this community ownership, so, these investors are getting profits plus the land owners where those 12 turbines are sited are also getting their lease payments royalties.

34:40: So, it's significant money that's being returned to the community through this ownership but also people perceived real local accountability. They've perceived local access. If we have any problems with the turbines we just call the board of directors. I got his number right here. They always return our calls. I see the president of the board of directors at the grocery store. I run into him all the time. Everyone sort of knows each other and they feel like that the board of directors are very responsive to any concerns there might be. We saw some anecdotal evidence of this like there's a bed and breakfast owner who... One of the crews and electricians, they were sort of remiss in paying their bill for the bed and breakfast. One call to the board of directors seemed to solve all that immediately. There's a couple other where someone was reimbursed. One of the land owners had a wind turbine that was community owned and he also had some corporately owned wind turbines on his property and in terms of getting reimbursed for damages, he said that the community owned wind farm was really responsive.

35:51: I guess conclusions from this project was that wind farm ownership didn't really seem to matter. And in rural sociology, in rural public policy, people really been thinking about the ownership of agriculture in the United States and the structure, the scale of agriculture, that you see a lot of really large agricultural operations that tend to be owned and operated by outsiders of the community. And that perhaps this wind farm ownership is continuing this trend. The community owned wind farms project seems to be a really big success. However, how often that can be duplicated just given the complexity of what they went through to get this thing built over a 10 year timeline with multiple... Just the negotiations they went through with Edison Energy, with the power purchase agreement, with all these... With the state regulators. It's amazing that it was built and seems to have positive impacts.

37:07: Okay, so last research project. This is sort of picking up off of this idea that these wind farms tend to be built by outsiders and maybe exacerbating these trends in agricultural ownership in the United States. My PhD student, Josh Fergin, and I decided to take a look at these more macro level... I guess the dispersion of wind turbines across the country. Where are they located? What can we say about the places where they're located? We started looking at some data from the Census of Agriculture, the USDA Census, AG Census, which has lots of interesting data on agricultural operations.

37:54: And so we pulled up a map, and this is a map of average farm size and wind turbine locations in the US, which was the first map that we'd just did a spatial overlay and it's like "Wow, they sort of like... It doesn't seem to be a random distribution here. Isn't that interesting?" The redder the counties are, the bigger the average farm size in acres and the greener the counties, the smaller average farm size. This is research that we're still doing now, still running some analysis. Hopefully we'll get this paper submitted this spring sometime, just to get a sneak peak of this project. I think what we did is just looking at counties that had wind turbines and counties that didn't. The blue counties are counties that have a wind turbine, and then we did... I wish Josh was here to explain this.

38:57: We did basically a cluster analysis, and there was three or four clusters in the United States where the geographic distribution of the turbines tended to be clustered in a way that couldn't be explained by chance, and is statistically significant in these areas where there just seems to be a disproportionately large number of wind turbines. Which we don't really know... Can't explain that precisely at this point. One of the first things we were interested in was what's the correlation between wind turbines and wind. It turns out that there is a correlation between wind turbines and wind resource. However, it doesn't necessarily look like that's totally what's going on. Obviously, there's huge areas of the United States that are very windy that have no wind turbines. And there's lots of different factors here. There's transmission mine access, there's proximity to urban areas, to the consumers. But there also seems to be these weird patterns or clumps and so... And then the high, high counties, these are these sort of... These statistically significant groups of turbines. The correlation between wind actually drops quite a bit if you're looking at just those areas.

40:28: Just running some correlations between number of turbines and some of these characteristic variables from the AG Census, so the county is the unit of analysis here, a county that has... The more turbines they have tends to be a higher size in acres, tends to be more operation income. I think I have them highlighted here, higher percentage of agricultural operators live off of the farm, higher percentage of tenant farmers, tend to be larger farms with larger income, tend to have more turbines at the county level. We're still sort of figuring out what these might mean necessarily, so if you guys have good ideas let me know. But these maps are really interesting. This is percent farms operated by tenants, which means that the owner of the land doesn't do the actual operations of the agriculture. They rent the land out to someone else.

41:41: Some of these areas, they seem to fit like a glove in there, or these counties tend to have high percentage of tenants. And there's a statistical correlation and the correlation goes up when you focus in on those high, high counties. Farms that live off... Principal operators who live off the farm, which means, the people doing the AG operations don't live nearby. You also see some interesting spatial correlations. Average farm size, again. It's interesting. It seems to align pretty well, spatially. Although the correlation drops if you look at just high, high counties. And average operation income, again, it's interesting. In a sea of blue around here, there's just a few red counties, and those happen to be the counties where there's lots of wind farms, in a bunch of these areas, although that's not the case here.

43:00: What does this all mean exactly? Not sure, but it seems to point towards... Wind turbines seem to be attracted to places where there's large farms with off farm operators. And if you look back at the table, there's this negative correlation with small farms with low levels of income. If you're a full owner operator, you've a negative correlation with wind development. Seems like wind turbines are attracted to places where the operator doesn't live there, where they're renting land out to agricultural operations, and where there's lots of income off the farm. Okay, so few concluding remarks. Private land ownership is a driving force shaping energy development in the United States.

44:03: The United States is really unique in that the mineral rights system that the US has is pretty unique other than Canada, in that the landowners own the mineral rights, the landowners own the wind rights. And that's a sort of an interesting regulatory tool, that's shaping energy development in the US, either incentivizing or limiting it. Public policy is shaping how private land ownership can regulate this. Public policy, to a good extent, is limiting public participation opportunities. It's incentivizing this private participation. It's sort of strengthening the private landowner's rights. When it comes to wind energy, it's really incentivizing corporate ownership and these sort of large outside owners. Private land ownership offers new forms of participation in energy citing.

45:10: There's this opportunity for more societal benefits from energy, because through this sort of private participation, seems to give people more trust. More benefits to landowners seem to accrue. There's this potential for more benefits to the community, so you've landowners that can say no. You've landowners that can say, "Well, we'll let you do this, but we want this in return." Whether they actually say that is another question, but there's at least the potential. A mechanism for which landowners can get concessions from energy. But there's all sorts of potential societal costs from this private participation model. You have lots of people who do not qualify to participate because they don't own land, or they don't have land that's suitable for development.

46:02: It maybe sort of exacerbating this gap between haves and have nots in these communities where the landowners who, I think usually, are sort of considered to be among the elites in a community. Landowners are the ones who are participating, or sort of holding the purse strings if you will. Whereas people who rent, people who live in town, people who have small acreages, or don't own their mineral rights, they sort of lose out under this scenario. I guess this is some of the research I've been up to, some of the things I've been thinking about when it comes to landowners and the regulation of energy development. I've been talking for a long time. I'd love to take questions that you might have or comments or ideas that might explain these maps of agricultural operations in turbine locations, so any questions?

[applause]