As a cool summer breeze blows over the vast farmland outside Hopedale, about 50 miles north of Springfield, the whisper of rustling corn leaves almost drowns out the soft, intermittent whooshing sound of three gargantuan fan blades slowly slicing through the air. Four hundred feet above the cornstalks, the fiberglass blades turn a generator capable of producing 1.5 megawatts – enough to power more than 300 homes. There are 67 sets of those blades towering over the flat landscape, forming a vast grove of slowly-spinning wind turbines that together can produce 100 megawatts of energy.

The turbines are part of the Rail Splitter Wind Farm in Logan and Tazewell counties, owned and operated by Houston-based Horizon Energy. The farm creates enough energy to power an estimated 30,000 homes and is one of 14 commercial wind farms in Illinois that together can produce up to 1,848 MW of energy. Now, a wind farm project planned for Sangamon County could dwarf the Rail Splitter project and create enough energy to power about 80,000 homes.

The Springfield-based American Wind Energy Management Corporation seeks to plant its flag in Illinois’ dark soil with 200 wind turbines west of Springfield, each with the capacity to generate 2 MW, for a total of 400 MW. AWEM’s sister company, European Wind Energy Management Corporation, already has three wind farms in its native Germany, and AWEM is planning another wind project in Logan County north of Sangamon County that will produce a potential 420 MW. To develop the projects, AWEM is partnering with California-based Oak Creek Energy Systems, which has projects under development totaling 1,574 MW in California.

Illinois is already sixth in the nation for wind energy capacity, and production is growing. At least seven wind energy companies operate in Illinois, and almost all of the state’s 1,848 MW capacity was added in the past seven years. In addition to the 14 existing commercial wind farms, 64 more wind farm projects are in the works, which would add almost 12 gigawatts of wind capacity for Illinois – enough to power an estimated 3.6 million homes. That doesn’t include Illinois’ numerous small wind farms generating less than 10 megawatts, most of which are controlled by school districts and municipalities.

The growth in wind isn’t limited to Illinois, either. The United States and the world as a whole have vastly increased wind energy capacity in the past two decades. In 1999, the U.S. had about 2.7 gigawatts of wind capacity, but that number ballooned to 35.2 gigawatts by the end of 2009 – an increase of more than 1,200 percent. Meanwhile, global wind capacity has jumped 555 percent from 24.3 gigawatts in 2001 to 159.2 gigawatts by the end of 2009.

The World Wind Energy Association expects global wind capacity to reach 203.5 gigawatts by the end of 2010.

Chris Nickell, vice president of site establishment with AWEM, says a wind farm in Sangamon County would offer new jobs, millions of dollars in property tax revenues and renewable green energy that satisfies current and future demand for electricity. That’s not to mention the profit for landowners who rent their land to AWEM. The company will lease about 25,000 acres of land from local landowners for the project, with each receiving about $100 per acre per year, plus between $3,500 and $4,000 for each machine annually, based on the gross revenue of the project. That works out to somewhere between $12,000 and $14,000 per landowner each year, Nickell says, adding that AWEM has already contracted about 19,000 acres for the project.

The 200-turbine project will also generate