BonnerSprings.com

It may soon be legal to generate your own electricity from wind in Bonner Springs, but you’ll need a big yard.

The Bonner Springs Planning Commission last week recommended approval of an amendment to the city’s zoning ordinance that allows and regulates the erection of wind turbines.

The item will go to the City Council for consideration at its July 14 meeting.

The amendment requires a certain setback from the property line for wind-energy-conversion systems, determined by the wind turbine rotor’s diameter. A 5-foot rotor, for example, would require a setback of 100 feet, while a 40-foot rotor would have to be set 385 feet from the property line.

The requirement serves to ensure that noise from the turbines won’t disturb neighbors and also provides a safe distance from neighboring property in case the turbine’s supporting structure should fall over.

At last week’s meeting Tim Daugherty, director of the National Agricultural Center and Hall of Fame, urged the commission to ditch the setback requirement based on rotor size and instead keep the original plan that only required a setback equal to the height of the turbine’s structure.

Daugherty said the Ag Hall had been looking into the use of a wind turbine to provide electricity for the site as well as for educational purposes and as a “marketing magnet.” The rotor-size-based setback requirement meant the Ag Hall couldn’t have a single turbine large enough to completely power the Ag Hall, he said. To do so, the Ag Hall would need a roughly 100-kilowatt turbine, with a rotor between 49 and 98 feet in diameter. A turbine that size would require a setback of more than 400 feet under the amended ordinance.

After a back-and-forth discussion between commissioners, they decided to omit the second setback requirement, which was based only on the turbine’s support structure height, for the sake of simplicity.

The amendment doesn’t restrict wind-energy conversion systems to agricultural zoning districts that the commissioners considered in April.

The setback requirements were based in part on those in the city of Hoisington and Hutchinson, two of the only cities in the state that address wind-energy conversion systems.

The Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kan., as well as the city of Mulvane has outlawed them, while Franklin County and Sedgwick County allow the systems with the approval of special-use and conditional-use permits, respectively.

The amendment was occasioned when Capitol Federal Park at Sandstone management’s expressed interest in installing wind turbines at the venue at 633 N. 130th St.

The idea is, with solar power cells, to power all the administrative buildings and functions at the site, said Jesse Jackson, director of green initiatives for Sandstone.

Jackson said earlier the amphitheater site was an especially good one for producing wind power, “because we are in a wind zone,” which he said had been rated by a turbine manufacturer to get much more wind than the rest of the Kansas City area.

The complete design is ready, Jackson said.

As for “the nuts and bolts,” including “the trenching for the turbine towers, the battery backups, the electrical system … the heavy-duty stuff that really costs a lot,” those kinds of things might come next.”

Jackson said the plans had progressed as far as they could without the city addressing the issue.

Minimum setbacks probably won’t be an issue for the Sandstone turbines if they come to be. Jackson said he’s looking at turbines that are on the smaller side, and not “industrial ones.”

After the commission’s vote, Dougherty said he would look for a sponsor or partner group to help the Ag Hall with funding for a turbine, one — or maybe more — which will be smaller than what he envisioned.

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