Wind and Solar Leasing in Kiowa County, Colorado

From lawsuit to moratorium: how the Invenergy dispute unfolded

Kiowa County approved 1041 permits for Invenergy's Towner East and Towner West wind projects in March 2024, each carrying a 1% impact fee under the county's renewable-energy regulations. Invenergy sued the county's Board of County Commissioners in April 2024, arguing the fee -- reported in coverage of the lawsuit as roughly $10 million per project, about $20 million combined -- was not tied to any quantifiable infrastructure impact and would fund unrelated, pre-existing county deficiencies rather than costs the projects themselves created.

Rather than litigate the fee structure permit-by-permit, Kiowa County's commissioners passed a six-month moratorium on all new 1041 renewable-energy permits, effective February 27, 2025, giving the county time to rewrite its impact-fee framework rather than defend the existing one in court. That moratorium ran its course and expired automatically on August 27, 2025, and the county held a public hearing on August 28, 2025 to consider revisions to the impact-fee section of its 1041 regulations -- a hearing that was continued into September as the rewrite process continued.

Resolution: amended permits, projects cleared to proceed

As the moratorium expired, Kiowa County's commissioners approved Resolutions 2025-12 and 2025-13, amending the Towner East and Towner West 1041 permits directly. With those amendments in place, both projects have a green light to move forward under their permits -- meaning that, as of this writing, the specific dispute that had left the projects' status uncertain is resolved, even as the county's broader 1041 impact-fee rulebook continues to be revised going forward.

For a buyer evaluating land with a wind lease tied to Towner East or Towner West specifically, this means the projects are no longer in a state of active permit litigation -- but it does not mean the underlying 1041 impact-fee framework is settled for the next developer. If you're looking at land for a new wind or solar lease (rather than a parcel already inside one of these two projects), ask the Land Use Department directly what version of the impact-fee rule is currently in force, since the county has been actively revising it through 2025 and into 2026.

What to verify before relying on a wind-lease agreement here

Given how much the permitting and fee landscape has shifted in a short period, treat any wind-lease documentation for a Kiowa County parcel as something to verify against the county's current 1041 Guidelines and Regulations rather than against a snapshot from a listing or an older news article. Confirm which resolution (or resolutions) currently govern the specific project the parcel sits within, whether the impact-fee rewrite has since been finalized, and whether any new setback or permitting standard adopted during the 2025 revision process applies to the parcel. The Land Use Department in Eads is the authoritative source for the current, in-force version of these rules.