Several years ago, my wife and I attended an Audubon talk on wind power. I'm generally for wind power, but besides stats about killing birds and bats, they had some good environmental arguments against carving out areas of deep forest to place windvanes. I came away with the impression that wind companies were comporting themselves no differently than Big Oil or King Coal, hence my nickname of Mighty Wind, which implies that things don't smell right.

In Rural New York, Windmills Can Bring Whiff of Corruption sub

Lured by state subsidies and buoyed by high oil prices, the wind industry has arrived in force in upstate New York, promising to bring jobs, tax revenue and cutting-edge energy to the long-struggling region. But in town after town, some residents say, the companies have delivered something else: an epidemic of corruption and intimidation, as they rush to acquire enough land to make the wind farms a reality.

The local debates over wind power are driven in a part by a vacuum at the state level. There is no state law governing where wind turbines can be built or how big they can be. That leaves it up to town officials, working part time and on advice from outside lawyers, some of whom may have conflicts of their own.