Buffalo Ridge Wind Farm

This first cluster was built by the Kenetech Corporation and runs northwest to Lake Shaokatan; it consists of seventy-three wind turbines.

The second phase occurred in 1998 when Zond Energy Systems built the next wind farm cluster near Hendricks, Minnesota.

Concerns involved with wind turbines revolve around the affected bird and bat populations that surround the Buffalo Ridge area.

A study featured in The American Midland Naturalist found that eighty-four to eighty-five percent of the seventy species of birds that live in the Buffalo Ridge area fly outside the range of the wind turbine blades.

[2] In 1996, Western EcoSystems Technolygy was contracted by Northern States Power to create an avian monitoring program for Buffalo Ridge.