Judge orders wind farm to be removed

lol, holy crap. That's an interesting legal principle to attack this. That's wild.

 

well, steal from the Indians, get scalped...

and there goes another reason EV cars will not fare well, with less electrical power to support them.

 

Lol. I love this crap. Get them ugly things off my lawn.

 

More like agree to a deal, decide you don't like it and come up with a novel way to get out of it.

 

Well, kinda? They said that the land was private property, but the Osage argued that they retained mineral rights to the land. I'd need to look at the specifics more deeply, but that's actually not wrong. A lot of properties will have had the mineral rights to the land sold away to some other party. I've seen it before. So, in theory, if the Osage had sold the land to the private buyer, but retained mineral rights, that's a pretty slick out for them.

Off I go to go dig up a court case, lol.

 

I’m just a dumb truck driver but what effect does the wind farm have on the minerals in the ground? Maybe I don’t know what mineral rights are.

 

"Mineral rights" is a bit of a misleading term. It covers basically anything you can extract from the ground, be it rocks, dirt, oil, etc. In this case, it hits because the builders took rock from the ground, (what constitutes the Osage Mineral Estate, in this case), crushed it, and used it for the commercial purpose of building the bases of the turbines. The local paper gives a pretty good summary of events:

Federal judge orders removal of wind turbines from Osage Mineral Estate - Osage News

It seems that Osage wind *knew* they needed to obtain a lease, but failed to do so.

 

That's why it's such a novel ruling. They dug up about 10 feet of dirt for footings. That's mineral rights they dug up.

 

Yeah, that's a bs argument. I'm sure it'll be reversed by a higher court, especially if the minerals extracted for excavation were reused on site. This ruling would mean that any property that sold off the mineral rights would not be able to dig even a basement if they were building a property on it.