Missouri's a pretty tough place to grow most crops. But there's one thing they've got plenty of: wind. So a small town, Rock Port, has decided to use the powerful breezes to its advantage, building four wind turbines to provide power to their town.
Missouri's a pretty tough place to grow most crops. But there's one thing they've got plenty of: wind. So a small town, Rock Port, has decided to use the powerful breezes to its advantage, building four wind turbines to provide power to their town.
"That's something to be very proud of, especially in a rural area like this — that we're doing our part for the environment," an area engineer, Jim Crawford, told LiveScience.
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Though the state may not be great for growing wheat or strawberries, Crawford said, "We're farming the wind, which is something that we have up here. The payback on a per-acre basis is generally quite good when compared to a lot of other crops, and it's as simple as getting a cup of coffee and watching the blades spin." Sounds a lot better than spending your days hunched over to pick berries from the ground.
Besides providing an environmentally-friendly source of power, the turbines provide an added bonus to Rock Port: cold, hard, cash. The wind farms are likely to bring in more than $1.1 million in county real estate taxes each year, and locals won't see an increase on their electricity bills for at least 15 to 20 years. We've got a feeling no one will be moving out of town any time soon - at least, not until the wind dies down.
