A wind turbine at the University of Minnesota's Eolos Wind Energy Research Field Station in Dakota County struck and killed a bald eagle, dismembering the bird into three pieces. The lower torso and tail were discovered first. The head and wings weren't found until over a month later.
Fox News reported that the U.S. Department of the Interior issued a violation notice in January, citing the university for breaking the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act by killing the eagle without an incidental take permit. The proposed civil penalty: $14,536. The turbine's construction was funded by a $7.9 million grant from the Obama Department of Energy, awarded in 2010.
The grant traces back to one of Barack Obama's first major legislative achievements — the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which appropriated roughly $90 billion to, as a Center for Climate and Energy Solutions report put it, "lay the foundation for a clean energy economy of the future." The Department of Energy received $35.2 billion of that pot.
Some foundation.
DOI spokesperson Matthew Middleton made the administration's position clear in comments to Fox News Digital. Under President Trump and Secretary Burgum, he said, the department:
"is enforcing the law to protect these iconic birds and demand accountability from an industry that has jeopardized these protected species."
Middleton didn't mince words about what that eagle represented — or what the wind industry has treated it as:
"America's bald eagles are a national treasure, not collateral damage for costly wind experiments. Wind companies will no longer get a free pass as this administration safeguards bald eagles and advances energy policies that prioritize affordability and strengthen America's economy."
The University of Minnesota, for its part, offered all the urgency of a faculty senate subcommittee. A university spokesperson confirmed the school had received the DOI's notice and said it is "currently under review." No substantive response. No explanation. No accountability. Just bureaucratic stalling dressed up as process.
The DOI's violation notice also revealed that the university was in the process of testing its collision detection sensors when the incident occurred. The sensors were supposed to prevent exactly this. The eagle died anyway — torn apart by the very machine that was allegedly being calibrated to protect it.
The University of Minnesota isn't alone. In January, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finalized fines totaling $32,340 against Ørsted Onshore North America for two bald eagles killed by Ørsted turbines — one in Nebraska, one in Illinois.
Fox News Digital had reported on those proposed fines months earlier. The January notice of violation against the university does not indicate it has since obtained an incidental take permit, and the Fish and Wildlife Service sent a letter urging the school to reassess the turbine's danger to eagles and consider applying for a long-term permit.
That the federal government has to write a university suggesting it may think about whether its giant spinning blades pose a threat to birds tells you everything about how seriously the green energy sector has taken wildlife protections.
For years, the wind industry operated under a kind of moral immunity. If your energy source carried the "clean" label, regulators looked the other way. Eagles died. Enforcement languished.
The tradeoff was always implicit: the climate mission mattered more than the birds. Nobody in Washington wanted to be the person who slowed down a wind farm to save a raptor — not when there were press conferences to hold and subsidies to distribute.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has been one of the most direct voices on the broader dysfunction behind projects like the Eolos facility. Appearing on Jesse Watters Primetime in June, Burgum called out the entire ideological apparatus propping up these ventures:
"When you think about the green new scam, it was pro-China, and it's anti-American, and it's also unaffordable and unreliable."
Burgum has also characterized solar and wind projects as "destabilizing our grid and driving up prices." That's not rhetoric — it's a description of what ratepayers across the country experience every time an unreliable energy source demands backup from the natural gas plants that were supposed to be retired.
The Eolos facility is a case study in how this works. Billions in taxpayer dollars flow through federal legislation into grants. Those grants fund research stations and experimental turbines. The turbines kill protected wildlife. The operators shrug. And the taxpayer foots the bill twice — once for the construction, and again when the fines come due at a public university funded by state dollars.
Nobody in the Obama administration's Department of Energy asked whether a $7.9 million wind turbine in Dakota County might pose a risk to bald eagles. Or if they did, the answer didn't matter enough to change the plan. The ARRA's $90 billion clean energy push was about speed and symbolism, not stewardship. Move fast. Build turbines. Claim credit. Let someone else deal with the carcasses.
What's changed is that the current administration treats the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act as something more than a suggestion. The combined enforcement actions against both the University of Minnesota and Ørsted signal a shift that the wind industry should study carefully. The days of treating eagle kills as an acceptable externality — a quiet cost of doing green business — are over.
A $14,536 fine won't bankrupt the University of Minnesota. But the principle it establishes carries real weight. If a research university running an experimental turbine funded by a federal grant can be held accountable, so can every commercial wind operation spinning blades across the Great Plains.
The wind industry spent years wrapping itself in moral authority. Clean energy. Carbon reduction. Saving the planet. But moral authority has a way of evaporating when your product shreds the national bird into three pieces and your best response is that the matter is "currently under review."
The Fish and Wildlife Service has urged the University of Minnesota to reassess and to pursue a long-term incidental take permit. Whether the university complies — or continues to stall behind vague statements about internal review — will test whether institutions that benefited from Obama-era green energy largesse are willing to meet even the most basic standards of environmental accountability.
The bald eagle that died at Eolos didn't have a lobby. It didn't have a press team or a federal grant. It had a law — one that existed long before the clean energy gold rush, and one that this administration has decided to enforce.
That eagle was torn apart by a machine the taxpayers built. The least anyone can do is hold someone responsible.
