Imagine life in a rural town with a beautiful landscape and neighbors that you often interact with. One day, big trucks carrying supplies to install wind turbines enter your town without warning. You’ve heard about the transition to cleaner energy through wind and its potential benefits, but you never expected it would happen in your backyard. How would you feel?

There are many reasons to oppose the transition to wind energy. They include the difficulties of changing our current established energy system, fossil fuels, and the unwillingness of people to shift their views on opinions towards wind turbines.

This is exactly what happened in the rural town of Sereno in Spain. Sereno is the focus of David McDermott Hughes’ book, Who Owns the Wind?: Climate Crisis and the Hope of Renewable Energy. As an anthropologist, Hughes uses Sereno as a case study in order to explore the complications of transitioning to renewable energy, specifically wind energy. He proposes that the transition to renewable energy is not only a technological transition, but also a social one.

Historically, when energy technology improves and there’s a shift to the new technology, the old technology continues to make a contribution to the overall energy generation. For example, water mills from the early nineteenth century still serve to generate electricity as hydropower in the twenty-first century. However, Hughes states that fossil fuels should not follow this process. Climate change poses a huge threat to everyone and the use of fossil fuels needs to be reduced to zero instead of still contributing to worldwide energy generation. 

Hughes begins The book by explaining wind as a natural, free source of energy. So why haven’t we put it to good use yet? Wind is hard to quantify, unlike coal. It is constantly flowing through space, not buried underground and ready to dig up. It is hard to hold and possess, so how can people own the wind? This is the main question that Hughes brings up in his case study with Sereno. 

Sereno (also called Andalusia) is a small village in rural Spain, with a population of roughly 400 people. Sereno barely existed forty years ago and was gradually built up through a communal cattle trail. However, the lands in Sereno are owned and controlled by the rich who do not live on those lands. With its population, it is too small to have a mayor, too small to have any political structure, and too small to have any leverage and say in what happens to the land. In 2006, Tarifa, a nearby town with a larger population that mainly controls Sereno, installed 250 wind turbines (60-meter blads and 90 meters tall) in the surrounding valley with little to no warning. Hughes follows the journey of this town and listens to the stories from the locals about the process of rejecting, protesting, and eventually surrendering to the turbines.

Hughes arrived in Sereno in 2015, 9 years after the wind farm was finished. He went to El Pollo, a bar where most residents go to hang out at the end of their work day. As he asked about their thoughts on the wind farm in their village, he got many negative comments and stories about what the residents had to go through. As the village is mainly controlled by Tarifa, residents of Sereno barely had any say in the decisions Tarifa made with Sereno. The first pushback – the anti-turbine movement – was led by Angel Monedero, an artist who loves admiring the landscape, and other long-standing residents. As an act of rebellion, Serenenos, residents living in Sereno, drove to Tarifa and blocked the only road to the construction site as part of a “No more turbines” protest. Their efforts failed due to Monedero eventually accepting a bribe to stop the protests and surrender to the turbines. The turbines were installed and even though there was a 500-meter legal limit from houses, it only applied to registered homes, which most of Sereno was not. Some turbines were placed as close as 300 meters.

After this betrayal from Monedero, Sereno was left fractured. As no new leadership rose in Sereno, residents did not believe in each other and thus, the village was unable to make any further moves against the turbines. The employment rate in Sereno stayed high at  40%. Few locals got jobs in the wind industry, which required skills they did not have. Wind farm employees came from outside the village. 

The winners were the landowners like Alejandro Baptista. Although he was hoping to develop a golf course on his land before the turbines, he now collects rent for the land on which four turbines sit. That puts him in a sticky spot with the rest of the residents. Although he collects amounts that are way below what tourism could have made, it is still more than what a Sereno resident can save in a year. 

In the culture of working-class coal communities, sons are sent in after their fathers to work in mines. Daughters are proud to be miners’ daughters. Hughes asks: why can’t wind do the same? With coal mines, there are 37 deaths per terawatt-hour of energy generated; wind only has 1 death per terawatt-hour. So why is being a miner celebrated? Hughes writes ‘the threat of climate change should ennoble turbines” but people don’t feel that saving the world from climate change is a noble act, thus not recognizing that wind power can be seen as heroic.

This deep-engrained perspective that shapes what people consider  “heroic” needs to change. One way is through invoking emotions and telling stories around wind turbines. With Sereno as an example not to be made again, wind turbines should be presented as a good force of change. Instead of describing turbines as just mechanical and lifeless, they should be described as graceful and sustainable. Susan Sontag, a photographer, writes of the photographer’s power to “make the ugly beautiful, the repulsive attractive, and the bland fascinating”. By the late 2010s, Serenenos came to accept the turbines and to consider them a part of their landscape. Diego, a resident that works at a wood-fired grill in Sereno, says the turbine blades make the landscape special. After some years of acceptance, the turbines in Sereno are now seen as sublime, invoking feelings of greatness beyond all possibilities.

Like the sailors who harness the wind, the world should let wind turbines do the same. With this example from Sereno, the views around wind turbines need to be changed. They are not the ugly machines taking up the view of the horizon, but rather, graceful and sustainable energy sources that add to the aesthetic appeal of the horizon. 

So who should be owning the wind?

The answer should be the people. The people living in the areas surrounding the turbines should be able to own the wind. The world should not make the same mistake as they did with Sereno. Shifting to renewable energy is both a technological and social change that must be done together. As a community, people need to be accepting of turbines in order for a successful transition to renewable energy, which starts with getting people to see the positive sides of wind turbines.