An Amazon-backed wind farm is coming to a struggling Mississippi Delta community

Amazon's involvement in a wind farm in Tunica County, Mississippi, has some residents hopeful but others questioning the tax incentives in an impoverished area.

Even before Amazon publicly revealed its involvement in a utility-scale wind farm being built in north Mississippi, residents of Tunica County were already buzzing. 

They had questions about what the project, the first of its kind in the state, might mean for one of the most impoverished regions of the country — and one prone to tornadoes.

“My first initial thought was: a wind farm in Mississippi?” said Marilyn Young, the director of the Tunica County Workforce Development Center, which connects residents with jobs and training programs. 

After she received assurances that the towering turbines could weather dangerous storms, Young is excited about the hundreds of construction jobs accompanying the project, the clean energy the wind farm will produce and the property taxes that will come from the venture. Young hopes the money, an estimated at least $60 million in the coming decades, will help the county’s public schools, which have faced challenges including low test scores and aging facilities.

The wind farm project in Tunica County, owned by the Virginia-based energy company AES, will sell power to Amazon and is expected to generate enough electricity to run more than 80,000 homes starting early next year. That in turn could bring a financial windfall to a Mississippi Delta community that everyone agrees could use one, especially after the casino industry, which had buoyed the county’s fortunes, has faltered.