Starting with the Converse County Board of County Commissioners hearing Monday evening, April 11, and continuing on Thursday morning, April 21, with the Wyoming Industrial Siting Council hearing, public officials in those two bodies will take evidence and consider whether to issue County and State permits to allow the 62-turbine “Pioneer Wind Park” project to go forward in the mountains south of Glenrock.
As we go into these important proceedings, it’s becoming increasingly evident that this project is only the first step in what’s likely to be a much larger effort to claim the Northern Laramie Range for wind energy development and transmission.
The real threat remains industrialization across the entire Northern Laramie Range
Thirteen months ago, in the Energy Edition of the Douglas Budget, we warned of the risk that uncontrolled industrial development in the Northern Laramie Range would turn Converse County into “an ‘eco-friendly’ version of West Virginia – in short, an impoverished, ‘green energy’ sacrifice zone”. Predictably, Wasatch Wind, in a letter to investors in the private equity firm backing it, scoffed at this notion.
Now, however, we’re beginning to understand how extensive this “sacrifice zone” will be. The Wasatch project is looking more and more like the first step in the total industrialization of the Northern Laramies:
- Its current “Pioneer Wind Park” proposal would involve 62 turbines in two phases, but it has leased land that would accommodate more.
- Wasatch’s representatives reportedly continue to shop this project for sale to investors as, potentially, a 1.5 gigawatt project, which is 1,000 1.5 mw turbines. This should come as no surprise, of course: When Wasatch initially applied for use of State land in the mountains, its “area of interest” extended across approximately 100,000 acres, from Muddy Mountain nearly to Laramie Peak, and its proposal then suggested the same 1.5 gigawatts of generating capacity. Since then, in the face of overwhelming public opposition, Wasatch has gone quiet about such an expansive – and destructive – possibility. But it is still alive, and the mountains remain unprotected.
- Wasatch can get away with touting such a large potential development because it is prepared to “game” the regulatory system that ordinarily prevents large-scale projects from pushing high-cost wind power onto consumers. Federal law specifies that “qualifying” small wind facilities – those below 80 mw - can force public utilities to buy power from them. Wasatch’s project – even at this first stage – is larger than the maximum size, so last summer it “self-certified” to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that the “Pioneer Wind Park” actually is two projects, each small enough to force Rocky Mountain Power to buy the output. Ironically, Rocky Mountain Power now is challenging exactly this kind of gaming before the Idaho Public Utility Commission, but in Wyoming seems willing to acquiesce in it.
- Meanwhile, extensive additional infrastructure is in the works. Gridflex Energy, LLC, with offices in Boise, Idaho, has filed a Preliminary Permit Application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (Docket #P-13862) for its planned Deer Creek Pumped Storage Project. Its proposal is to dam Deer Creek to create a reservoir that could drain to generate hydropower at times that wind turbines aren’t turning, them pump the water back up when wind energy is back on the grid. Not surprisingly, the boundaries of the Deer Creek Pumped Storage Project border Wasatch Wind's Pioneer Wind Park project boundary.
Under these circumstances, it by no means is clear that the Wasatch application in either the Converse County Board or the Wyoming Industrial Siting Council conveys the whole story – reasonable care on the part of these officials would suggest they defer considering this application until they have the full story.
Converse County commissioners still could act in the public interest, and to preserve the rights of neighbors and the community in the existing land uses protected by law.
As everyone in Converse County knows by now, public opposition to this kind of development in the mountains is overwhelming and has been expressed on multiple occasions:
- In more than 900 citizen petitions;
- In the defeat in the 2010 elections of Converse County candidates supporting
industrial wind development in the mountains; - In the Clarion Associates survey commissioned by Converse County last fall;
- In NLRA’s all-households poll in December, which showed 70%+ opposition to
the Wasatch project; - In massive attendance at hearings by citizens opposed to industrialization in the
mountains.
It is equally obvious, and will become even clearer in the course of the coming hearings, that the property values and land uses of landowners neighboring this development – their “quiet enjoyment” of their property – are the rights truly at risk as a result of this development.
Even so, a majority of the board of County Commissioners has voted repeatedly against land use regulation that would protect the mountains. The reason the majority gives, of
course, is the “private property rights” of pro-wind landholders to host this intrusive industrial development regardless of its impact on neighbors or the public as a whole.
The simple fact, however is that there is no such legal “right” to pursue a contemplated development: As recently as February 4 this year, the Wyoming Supreme Court reiterated, in Sheridan County v. Gold, that there is “a vested property right only in existing land uses, and not in prospective land uses”, and that it could find “no authority that suggests a property owner has a vested property right in a contemplated development...” (emphasis supplied). The Court quoted from an earlier federal case the “general rule that a property owner has no vested right (which will withstand a later zoning regulation) in a development which is merely contemplated.”
The simple fact is that the Converse County commissioners still can act in the interests of the overwhelming majority of County citizens to protect the mountains from the kind of large-scale industrial development new being proposed. In fact, the law strongly suggests that, if they fail to do so, neighboring landowners and perhaps others, with vested rights in existing uses, will be the ones whose rights are trampled.