Cashing in on Wyoming Wind

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

By Henry Sweets

As America grows painfully aware of its carbon emissions and laments the hundreds of billions it spends on foreign oil every year, politicians, voters and billionaire investors are looking to domestic wind power as a savior of America’s energy woes.
And Wyoming is looking to reap the benefits of the country’s newfound push for alternative energy sources.

A recent study by National Grid and Energy Strategies, a London-based utility and transmission firm, claimed that Wyoming wind is the most viable renewable energy needed to serve energy markets in California, Arizona and Nevada, three states that have passed initiatives to have sizeable portions of their energy portfolios represented by renewable resources within the next several years.

Wyoming’s landowners, many of them ranchers, want to cash in on that resource. The whirling turbines don’t impede their grazing cattle, and the money made from leasing surface rights gives ranchers a sizeable cut of a wind developer’s profits.

Ed Werner from the Wyoming Wind Working Group (WWWG) said he receives several phone calls a week from landowners asking how they can find a developer to build wind turbines on their land. The WWWG is a grassroots organization established to assist and promote the development of wind energy in Wyoming.

But the dash to have cash cows in the form of turbines looming over their property has one major limiting obstacle: how to sell the energy they produce, said Rob Hurless, Gov. Dave Freudenthal’s energy advisor.

The need for transmission lines
Without adequate numbers of transmission lines, the state’s potential to supply wind power to other parts of the country is limited.

“If you look at a wind map of the country and look at onshore wind resources, Wyoming kind of pops to the top,” Hurless said. “The problem, historically, has not been the quality of resources or level of interest on the part of the developer or land owner, it’s been constrained by transmission, the ability to move power out.”

Wyoming, already a net energy exporter, doesn’t have enough customers in state to buy the thousands of megawatts that its winds can produce. It needs huge electric transmission lines that weave millions of pounds of steel through a patchwork of state, federal and private lands and a sea of red tape in order to carry the electricity to high population areas like Denver, Salt Lake City and, if proposed projects succeed, Las Vegas and other western points.

But once the transmission lines are built, thousands of turbines will follow. The question then becomes how will this fledgling industry be molded or tempered with regulations that will keep investors, developers, government officials, landowners and neighbors all happy.
 
What’s being done
The Wyoming Infrastructure Authority (WIA) was created in 2004 by the state Legislature to generate interest between electricity buyers and electricity sellers, and to help get large-scale transmission projects off the ground.

“People refer to it as the chicken and egg problem, because you’ve got to have someone willing to put power on the line and basically have got to have someone willing to buy the power on the other end,” said Steve Waddington, the WIA director. “We certainly view ourselves as a catalyst and a motivator, so we talk with developers and with load serving entities and try to foster development that way.”

Though the WIA was originally created to aid all forms of electricity, “our focus really has turned to wind,” Waddington said. There are currently four projects, at various stages of inception, that use a “variety of business models” to achieve the task of taking Wyoming’s electricity to market, he said. The four currently proposed lines could carry power to Colorado by 2013, Oregon by 2014, Utah by 2015, and Nevada by 2015.

Possible snags in the planning process
Hurless explained that though three of the projects have the support of wealthy investors like Warren Buffet and Philip Anschutz, the proposed lines will not be completed until obstacles are overcome.

Once a proposed transmission line has sufficient investment to pay for the construction, which can cost billions of dollars, a route must be established across federal and private lands. As a result, proposed lines will most likely face environmental impact analyses and deals with countless landowners.

In addition, each state that uses the line could present regulations through which the proposing party must wade.
It’s a process that can take several years.
“Everybody wants a wind farm, but nobody wants a transmission line [on their property],” Werner said.

Werner said people who are “serious about building a transmission line” need to pay landowners enough money or expensive legal battles could bog down their project.
Waddington said to his knowledge, no projects are far enough along to be dealing with individual landowners, but “as these projects go forward, I could see landowners asking for more [money], and that will just be a negotiations between the parties involved.”
According to Gregory Keeley, a spokesman for U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, the Department of Energy already has legislation in place that allows it to facilitate decisions on transmission projects crossing federal land. But Barrasso doesn’t think the Senate has done enough to address the question of how to get energy from where it is produced to where it is used, Keeley said. Barrasso has introduced a bill that will “provide incentives for the construction of transmission lines for renewable energy, including wind-generated electricity,” Keeley said. The incentives would be similar to those granted to airports, sewer projects, intercity rails and green buildings, he said.

Preparing for the rush
Once a transmission line is completed, officials expect developers to act quickly to build wind turbines. That first round of wind development will change the face of several Wyoming counties, and some local governments have scrambled to make wind development regulations that protect the interest of their communities.

“When the transmission lines come in, then it’s going to be like a jail break,” said Marlin Johnson, the head of planning and zoning for Platte County in southeast Wyoming.
Platte County currently has no wind farms because it lacks transmission capacity, but for the last few years Johnson said his office has been issuing “scores and scores” of permits for anemometers, the instruments used to measure wind flows and to help determine if a piece of land is suitable for harvesting wind energy. His county began writing regulations early last year so they would be ready for the influx of anticipated wind development.

Many community members are concerned with how the huge turbines could change the local landscape, Johnson said. From a county government perspective, wear and tear on roads by trucks hauling huge turbine parts cause the greatest concern.
Platte County’s regulations addressed these concerns by requiring wind turbines be a certain distance from roads, subdivisions, town limits and existing homes. The county regulations also include language to ensure the damage to roads would be mitigated. Other counties have written similar restrictions on the development and implementation of wind energy systems.

In Sweetwater County, a proposed wind farm on top of White Mountain caused concern that it would ruin the mountain vista.

“[The proposed wind farm] had the potential of being very visible from the city of Rock Springs, so we were very careful as to where they were located on the rim of White Mount,” chairman of the Sweetwater County Commission Wally Johnson said.
Jonathan Naughton from the University of Wyoming’s Wind Energy Center said the developments will happen no matter what, but the quality of them depends on the actions taken by the various local and state governments.

The center was established by bringing different university departments together to create a state of the art wind studies program, Naughton said.

“In one sense, Wyoming doesn’t have to do anything. The wind is here, and people want it,” he said. “On the other hand, what I would like to see is that the state is proactive about this - and not just the state but the local governments - because a lot of the decisions about where to site wind farms come from the counties. I’d like to see the state and county work together to do this in a good way … in a way that is responsible and well thought out.”

The state’s role
Wyoming currently has no special regulatory body to oversee wind development, but the Wyoming Industrial Siting Council, which was created to oversee projects like oil refineries and coalmines, must oversee any wind project costing more than $160 million, said Werner of the WWWG.

Bruce Morley, who has been working to develop wind resources in Wyoming and across the west for 20 years, said that the siting council is “very thorough and very proficient in making sure [wind projects are] designed right and will be executed properly.”
But Werner is concerned that, though wind developers have done what’s “right” so far, it doesn’t mean that other groups won’t arrive on the scene and make decisions that might cause ire among other groups.

“As a wind advocate, one of my biggest concerns is that over the next couple of years, we won’t cause enough of a problem that it causes a shut down,” Werner said. “So that [developers] can go out an make these projects work right, so that there isn’t this groundswell of hatred against them.”

Erik Molvar of the Wyoming Biodiversity Conservation Alliance said that a wind farm in Altamont, Calif., was placed in a raptor nesting area and migration area, killing a number of hawks and eagles. The project gave wind energy a bad name for a period of time, he said. His organization is working to develop a map that shows the “smart” areas to place wind turbines so they don’t have adverse impacts on wildlife.
Werner said that he thought wind development could go smoothly in Wyoming. His main concern is that all parties interested are able to communicate freely and respect each other. More guidance from state lawmakers would facilitate that process to avoid serious roadblocks, he said.

“We need the legislature to make sure the rules are understood, otherwise we’re going to have the judges write the rules for us,” he said.

What does it mean for Wyoming?
“Wyoming ranchers, farmers, small businessmen and women, and many landowners throughout the state have benefited from the easements paid for the placement of wind turbines,” Keeley wrote in an emailed response to questions for Barrasso. “Maintenance of these turbines will provide some good paying jobs for Wyoming technicians. In addition, counties, school districts and special districts will benefit from a small uptick in property taxes through increased assessed valuations.”

Wind farms don’t have to pay sales tax, but they are taxed yearly on 11.5 percent of their property value. The tax revenue goes to that county.

In addition to technical training for turbine maintenance jobs generated instate, Naughton of the Wind Energy Center said that the University of Wyoming was in a unique position to be an international leader in new wind technology. Wind energy is a “strange technology,” he said, because it requires understanding the aerodynamics of the blades, the nature of the wind, the anchoring of the turbine to the ground and the stability of that turbine in high wind events.

Naughton also hopes that the state can take steps to attract turbine manufacturers here, since Wyoming is centrally located in the next wave of wind development in states like Montana, Texas, Colorado and Oklahoma.

Courtesy Photo
A new ENERGY frontier looms on the HORIZON

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