Front Generator Wind Turbine

Bob Lyons and Stephen Fouch Jr. still wave when they drive past each other on the road, but it remains to be seen how long the two remain neighborly.

“We’ve never had any issues before, but these projects have been known to split communities,” Fouch said, referring to the proposed Bluff Point wind farm.

The plant manager at a Portland factory, Fouch already lost his cool once, at a planning commission meeting in December, when he slammed a chair on the floor before walking out. “I was upset,” he said recently. “I made an a-- out of myself.”

Lyons, a farmer, retired longtime teacher and the current Pike Township trustee, stands to profit from the wind farm spread out on more than 12,000 acres in southern Jay and northern Randolph counties, including his farm. Fouch, on the other hand, will gain nothing, and he could see a decrease in his property value and quality of life, he says.

The two live about a mile apart on the same road in southern Jay County.

A one-year extension of a key tax credit for the wind industry was included in the fiscal cliff deal Congress passed on New Year’s Day.

The tax credit, which has been a major driver for wind development across the country in the past two decades, is worth 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour of energy produced by new wind installations for their first 10 years of operation.

“That was important for our industry and for this project (Bluff Point),” said Mary Wells, a spokeswoman for Juno Beach, Fla.-based NextEra Energy Resources, a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, a Fortune 200 company with 2011 revenues of more than $15.3 billion. “It makes wind energy even more competitive.”

'Not a wind farm yet'

The last big step before Bluff Point proceeds to construction is for NextEra to sign a long-term contract with an electric utility like Indiana Michigan Power, a rural electric cooperative or a municipal power authority to purchase the wind farm’s power.

“We’re not a wind farm yet,” Wells said. “We need to secure that customer.”

But NextEra, the largest wind generator in North America, is optimistic.