Ari Phillips: The wind farm will be sited in south-central Wyoming’s Carbon County where it will sprawl across a 320,000-acre checkerboard of private land, state land, and federal land, but only occupy some 2,000 acres. The turbines stand 328-feet tall and have 200-foot-long blades. However, the energy from the project is anticipated to be exported to utility customers in California, Arizona, and Nevada — with none of it remaining in Wyoming. The company is still negotiating power purchase agreements with utilities. Wyoming currently gets its energy from fossil fuel projects, mostly coal. While states like California have implemented ambitious Renewable Energy Portfolios, it can seem to go against the principle of these guidelines to get clean energy from coal-driven states that themselves have no emissions reductions plans. For this reason some in these western states advocate developing homegrown renewable energy from geothermal, hydropower, and solar rather than stocking up on wind from less environmentally-friendly states. Wyoming recently joined 11 other states in suing the EPA over its proposed carbon rules. Under the proposed rules, Wyoming would have to cut its greenhouse gas emissions from existing coal-fired power plants by about one-quarter by 2030. Given the flexibility of the program, Wyoming could easily shift some of the generation from coal to wind if pushback by special interests from the coal industry and coal-supporting groups like the American Legislative Executive Council could be overcome. Wyoming produced 39 percent of all coal mined in the United States in 2012, and provided coal to 34 different states. So the established industry would rather see more rail lines than transmission lines built.
Posted on: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 21:20:45 +0000
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