Spain's Wind-Farm Bargain
Renewable-energy projects can boost the economy of a rural town—if the community has a say in development.
Go looking for wind farms in Spain, and you might quickly end up in Castilla–La Mancha, a region southeast of Madrid. This is the place where Don Quixote, Miquel de Cervantes's delusional Man of La Mancha, attacked small wooden windmills he perceived as fierce giants and where today giant wind turbines have become an embedded part of the landscape.
There, I met Mayor Isabel Martínez Arnedo, who has run the town of Higueruela since 2019. The region's distinctive wind whipped her dark curls as she stepped out of her car. "Look!" she said in Spanish. "Windmills, windmills, windmills." They were lined up along a ridge at the edge of the small rural town, blades spinning high atop pale-blue towers. A verdant valley lay below, and beyond that, another ridge was crowned with more turbines. When the town's wind farms were first built, more than 25 years ago, "this was seen as futuristic," she told me. She was just 23 years old then, and it was the largest wind farm in Europe, the second largest in the world. Since that time, she said, she has come to believe that renewable-energy projects can save a dying town, as long as it has a guiding role in their implementation.
In the United States, views on renewable-energy projects are fraught. Adoption has been exponential; so has resistance. Last year, President Trump signed a bill that gutted support for projects, and he holds a particular animus toward wind power. Efforts to shut down renewable-energy projects are under way in every state except Alaska. Communities object to renewables for a variety of reasons, researchers from MIT found—including concerns about public and environmental health, diminished property values, and lack of public participation—and that opposition can prioritize such values even over possible economic gain.
In the past six years, by contrast, Spain has doubled its wind and solar capacity and reduced its dependence on gas power dramatically. Renewables account for about 16 percent of the energy mix in the U.S., whereas more than half of Spain's energy now comes from them as it races toward the goal of climate neutrality by 2050. Spain's economy is booming, and many consider lower energy costs a contributing factor. Though I found pockets of resistance to the shift, most people I spoke with during three months of reporting across the country recognized Spain's role in contributing to the fight against climate change.
If the global shift to more clean energy is irreversible, as many economic and technological indicators suggest, then American rollbacks seem destined to cause more problems than they solve. At the same time, renewable development can radically alter landscapes, as in India, where I'd reported on how one of the world's largest solar farms took up 13,000 acres, surrounding five small villages that remain like stranded islands. Was there a way to develop renewables that worked better for the communities in which they're located? Perhaps Higueruela, as an early wind-energy adopter, could offer a lesson.
When the wind farm arrived, the municipality of Higueruela was dying. Young people left to study and find work and never returned. In 1960, the town had about 3,500 citizens. By 2000, there were just over 1,000. This "great emptying" is widespread in rural parts of Spain, as it is in rural America. If the wind park was futuristic, it also helped the town imagine a future in which young people would not leave, Martínez Arnedo told me.
Opportunity often depends on money, and the windfall from wind energy delivered it. Taxes on the renewable-energy companies and leasing fees transformed Higueruela's economics, Martínez Arnedo said: Of its annual budget, roughly 40 percent now comes directly from the presence of wind energy. A few locals do work for Iberdrola, the company that manages the wind farms, or have started businesses that directly relate to the industry, such as a turbine-oil-changing business that now works regionally. But most of the jobs grew out of the broader ecosystem stimulated by the presence of renewables, the mayor said.
Over 20 years, using its boosted revenue, the town built a library and a youth center; the elementary school added sports, music, English, and dancing. The town now operates a bus that carries secondary schoolchildren to a larger town 22 kilometers away, and a free bus to Albacete, a small city 50 kilometers away, so access to higher education is possible without having to move away. For adults, community offerings include Pilates and painting. Higueruela offers support to help seniors stay in their homes, and when they can't, they can move to the El Jardín Senior Center on the town square, which opened in 2006 and employs 100 locals, many of them women who might struggle to find employment in more industrial, male-dominated sectors. Although electricity grids are too complicated to pass along free or discounted power to locals, the town now provides up to 2,000 euros to install rooftop solar and improve home insulation to bring energy bills down. Without the wind farms, the town would not be able to have all of these services and facilities, the mayor told me.
Each of these offerings also translates into jobs, and traditional agriculture has continued unabated beneath the wind turbines. Though the town's population is not rising, it is sustaining itself. Young people who stayed are now having babies. "We have a group of children," the mayor told me, of her students at the elementary school, where she teaches. "We call them Generation Wind."
Higueruela is not unique. Cláudia Serra-Sala, an economist at the University of Girona, collected budget data from 1994 to 2022 to see how Spanish wind farms change municipal finances and found, on average, a 45 percent increase in revenue per capita. The funds buoyed towns and served as a positive feedback loop of development, the way bringing a railroad to town once did.
Wind energy has its critics in Spain. In the lowlands of Higueruela, I met Lucas del las Heras and Pablo Jutglá Monedon, avid birders who live in the area, although not Higueruela itself, and are members of the conservation cooperative Dendros. As we watched European red-rumped swallows and marsh harriers swoop in front of us, they argued that wind farms are a land grab that are wrecking vistas and harming biodiversity. Best practices—including community input during initial planning and avoiding biodiverse hot spots such as Natura 2000 areas, a European network of valuable habitats—are not always required, or followed. The Ukraine war deepened Spain's aggressive push toward renewables and energy independence, and the men from Dendros and others I spoke with felt that environmental protections were being left by the wayside.
These complaints all have truth to them. Electricity can seem like a bit of a magic trick, but every watt of energy comes from somewhere. That ridge where I stood with the mayor was far from pristine—we walked amid Moorish ruins that lay in the turbines' shadow—but without the wind generators, Higueruela's vista would have maintained a timeless bucolic aura.
At the same time, the fossil-fuel-production system has costs, too, not least the grave environmental and health impacts on communities, which differ substantively from the impacts of a solar or wind farm. A 2023 World Resources Institute report, for instance, found that nearly half of people living in U.S. communities historically based on oil, coal, and gas economies were in areas identified as disadvantaged, plagued by air pollution, poverty, and health problems.xThe current scale of fossil-fuel burning is also disrupting entire Earth-system functions, which in turn drives fuel demand (as people try to stay warm or cool) and exacerbates the kind of extreme weather that can destroy communities and transform ecosystems. Spain is already experiencing heat waves and the whiplash of drought and flood. Outside Sevilla, the town of Carmona, in Andalusia, is a place so picturesque that it's being considered as a UNESCO World Heritage site, yet it is embracing solar farms. "If you do not put in renewable energy, it is true, there is the most beautiful field," Carmona's mayor, Juan Avila, told me. "But why do you need the most beautiful field if later it does not rain?"
Still, even willing towns have their limits. A few years ago, Iberdrola, the energy company, proposed a hybrid project in Higueruela, adding solar to the wind-energy mix. It wanted to use "the most fertile lands of Higueruela," Martínez Arnedo told me. "We said no." Instead, the town and Iberdrola are exploring the possibility of replacing the 243 existing turbines with just 63 much larger ones, and still generate the same amount of power.
The possibility of local benefits from renewables is not confined to Spain. While reporting on renewables years ago in Texas, I learned that Sweetwater—another town that adopted wind energy early and eagerly (and with Republican support)—had increased its tax base fivefold and channeled the money into civic improvements. But that was before energy production in the United States became so politicized. Martínez Arnedo told me that, for a town to benefit from renewable development, "in that mediation between the companies that want to eat the municipalities and the municipalities themselves, you have to look for a balance." Many Americans seem unwilling to even consider trying to find that. Change always has a cost, but any place facing the same type of downturn Higueruela experienced also has to contend with the risk of maintaining the status quo and consider whether that's even possible. A place like this one could easily end up with no wind farms, but soon enough it may not have rain and eventually no town, either.
