By MARTA HEPLER DRAHOS
mdrahos@record-eagle.com
BENZONIA — Back in the 1800s, Rich Brauer's Benzie County property produced cattle, corn and other crops.
In the 1930s it grew ginseng, a popular root used in Asian medicine.
Now the Traverse City filmmaker wants to use the land for a different, 21st-century, kind of production: a community wind farm.
The original property just west of Benzie Central High School has been in the family since Brauer's father purchased it 45 years ago as a sort of retreat. Once a thriving farm with a house, barns and wells, the property had long since been vacant and the house moved to Narrow Gauge Road.
It was the perfect environment for Brauer, then a devotee of Foxfire, a magazine and book series from Southern Appalachia that focused on traditional crafts and skills.
"When I was going to college at NMC in 1972 I would hitchhike there and build a log cabin on it," recalled Brauer, who relied on a CB radio for communication. "I took a lawn mower engine and a car alternator and powered the whole cabin with it. There's something kind of fun and warm and fuzzy about creating your own power."
Though the cabin burned down in 1975, after Brauer left for California to study film, the woods and farmland continued to call to him. Over the years he added to the property, buying up chunks of adjacent land to spare it from development. Now it totals 250 acres.
It was in California that Brauer was first exposed to wind energy, the fastest growing source of energy in the world.
In 1996, when Traverse City Light & Power offered customers a "green rate" to help build the turbine on M-72 and receive all their annual electric consumption through wind energy, he was among the first to sign up.
That experiment eventually led to the idea of the Brauer Energy Farm, which would create clean renewable energy through a small number of multimillion-dollar wind turbines, paid for by investors, on about a quarter of Brauer's property. The farm would sell the energy back onto the grid to a utility or other purchaser.
The project's impact would be felt all over the county, from the jobs and ecotourism it would create, to the sustainable agriculture operation the turbines could help support, said Tom Karas, the site development manager and director of the Michigan Energy Alternatives Project. It could even be tied into local schools for science and other studies.
For Brauer and the local investor group, it would mean revenue that "keeps circulating within the community, much more than any other energy dollar spent," Karas said.
Beyond that, the farm is simply "the right thing to do," Brauer said — not only for his land and his grandchildren's future, but for the common good.
"Renewable energy is not only a legal mandate but a cultural mandate," he said. "When I see a turbine it represents good science — smart science — and an independent United States."
The farm would be operated through a partnership between Brauer and the Michigan Land Use Institute, an independent nonprofit organization that has been working on the project for about two years. Initially it would start with a pair of 2-megawatt (or under) wind turbines — up to three times the size of the M-72 turbine — that could be up in as soon as a year or two, Karas said.
But before the farm can become a reality, a year's worth of wind speed and direction data collected from a 100-foot-tall "anemometer" or metering tower on the property has to be analyzed. The Florida-based Wind Energy Consulting and Contracting company is studying the data with a $20,000 Michigan Land Use Institute grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The analysis will not only help determine if the location is windy enough but whether the project is feasible in other respects, Brauer said.
"It's not just, 'Is there enough wind and what direction is it from?' but 'How much is it going to cost?' and 'How much is it going to cost to put that energy back on the line?' and 'Is there headroom on the wire for more electricity, and if there is more headroom does the energy company even want it?'" he said.
Environmental and other factors, like the impact on migratory and native birds and the impact on neighbors from the "flicker" the turbine produces as it spins, also will be taken into consideration.
The report could be back by the end of August, Karas said.
If it's positive, Brauer would likely move ahead with the project. Already it has the support of the Benzie community, he said.
"What I've seen in Benzie County is they are very receptive to this community wind farm. It matches the independent spirit of the person that seems to live (there). They're kind of a throwback to a simpler time," he said.
