Stearns County commissioners this morning decided not to approve the moratorium on large wind energy operations that a number of residents had requested.

In turning down the effort to slow wind energy production, commissioners in one of Minnesota's largest counties also decided to reactivate a committee to watch over the issue and specifically requested that people opposed to wind projects be appointed to help.

That struck me as significant for a couple reasons, especially after I noted in a blog post here last week that I wasn't convinced Stearns County residents had learned much since the 1970s power line war in terms of talking to themselves about energy issues. And there are proposed wind projects all over the map of the 150,000-resident county in central Minnesota.

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Dave Peters, Ground Level from MPR