Usually rural wind farms are placed on privately owned land. The landowners willingly lease land for hosting the turbines. This is not a lot different from land

Usually rural wind farms are placed on privately owned land. The landowners willingly lease land for hosting the turbines. This is not a lot different from land owners leasing land to grow crops or graze animals. Large land owners probably don't live "near" those turbines for the same reason they don't live near all their leased pasture land -- their holdings are too large for their primary residence to be near all of it. In my experience the complaints about wind farms in the countryside come mostly from smaller landowners and/or people who don't get their income primarily from the land. This includes people who moved to a rural setting after retirement and "lifestyle" farmers who don't need significant income from their acreage. In my county the hearings about a new wind/solar complex attracted supportive comments from a half dozen working farm families and negative comments from a zillion non-farming families. The small number of supportive farm families probably owned more land than the critics. They were hoping to collect lease payments from wind turbines to supplement income from agricultural output and offset the variability of agricultural profits. It's hard to say which side of this conflict, if any, represents the "elites." The electricity will mostly go to urban areas, because that's where consumption is concentrated. (Of course, that's also true for typical rural products like beef, wine, and onions.) The large farming landowners could be considered "elites" because they own a lot of land. But they're also typically making thin profits from each acre, and get rich only if they choose to sell the land. The critics could be considered "elites" because they are basking in the rural ambience without depending on the agricultural or extractive activities that typically dominate rural areas. They'll be economically fine if wind farming is banned. Or if cows are banned. In that sense they share the sentiments of the anti-wind-farm crowd living in Martha's Vineyard, who believe that energy should be produced Somewhere Else where it is neither heard nor seen.