SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
wind power
Community Benefits Agreements Can Embed Justice in the Clean Energy Transition
In states that are leading the way, CBAs ensure that energy projects provide clean power and bring economic and social benefits to the communities most impacted.
Jan 11, 2025
The clean energy transition is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build momentum for environmental justice.
As the transition accelerates, we face a choice: Will it reproduce the harms of the past fossil fuel-based energy system, or will it create a fairer, more just future where more people can access and benefit from accessible and affordable clean energy? For far too long, historically marginalized communities have been excluded from decisions about the challenges they face, and energy infrastructure is no exception.
Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs) are a tool for ensuring frontline communities receive real, tangible benefits from renewable energy projects.
States that embrace policies like CBAs are showing what’s possible: a future where energy solutions uplift communities rather than burden them.
CBAs are legally binding agreements between developers and communities that outline commitments such as local job creation, workforce training, or investments in public infrastructure. In states that are leading the way, CBAs ensure that energy projects provide clean power and bring economic and social benefits to the communities most impacted. From Michigan to California, states are showing what’s possible:
- In Michigan, developers pay host communities $2,000 per megawatt of energy capacity.
- In California, enforceable agreements with grassroots organizations ensure benefits flow directly to local people.
- In Maine, wind projects deliver long-term financial contributions to communities hosting the turbines.
These policies are not just about energy infrastructure; they represent a shift in power, creating systemic change for equity, accountability, and justice, giving those communities most affected by energy development a voice along with a share of benefits. These state successes show what's possible, but to scale these benefits nationwide, we need stronger federal and state policies working in tandem—like the Justice40 Initiative.
The federal Justice40 Initiative aims to allocate 40% of federal climate and energy investment benefits to communities that have long been overburdened by pollution and underinvestment. State policies require CBAs to build on this foundation, ensuring that energy projects are designed with and for communities that have historically been excluded from decision-making.
By centering racial justice in the clean energy transition, CBAs can:
- Deliver good-paying local jobs.
- Fund schools, public health, and infrastructure.
- Empower communities to shape the projects in their backyards.
Yet CBAs are only as strong as the policies that back them. Some developers will inevitably try to exploit loopholes, sidestep accountability, or push vague agreements that deliver little. In California, legally enforceable agreements with grassroots organizations ensure that the benefits of renewable energy projects flow directly to the local communities hosting them. To advance energy justice, CBAs must be enforceable (legally binding), transparent, and community-driven, and not just another box for developers to check.
We are at a turning point. State governments have a chance to lead by mandating strong, enforceable CBAs and ensuring communities are part of the decision-making process. This isn’t just about clean energy—it’s about repairing harm, investing in people, and building a just energy future.
The clean energy transition can be more than reducing emissions—it can be a powerful pathway to justice, equity, and community empowerment. States that embrace policies like CBAs are showing what’s possible: a future where energy solutions uplift communities rather than burden them.
By centering racial justice in the clean energy transition, CBAs can deliver tangible benefits that create lasting change:
- Good-paying local jobs that boost economic opportunity.
- Funding for schools, public health, and infrastructure to address long-standing inequities.
- Empowered communities that have a say in shaping projects in their own backyards.
CBAs ensure that historically excluded communities move from being merely hosts of energy infrastructure to being active partners and beneficiaries of the clean energy revolution.
Keep ReadingShow Less
What a GOP Government Will Really Mean for the Renewable Energy Rollout
If the next Trump administration is serious about pulling the plug on clean energy, that will add up to a lot of jobs and investments to undo in states and districts where the president-elect handily won the election.
Dec 18, 2024
For all that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump trashed renewable energy on the stump, much of his ranting may very well become a murmur when he returns to the Oval Office.
Obscured by his “green new scam” rhetoric is a mad scramble by his supporters in Congress to reap the economic benefits of green industry for their states and districts. The increasing investments, precisely in the places that voted for him, make President-elect Trump’s pledge to “terminate” many green programs political wolf talk. That is because the renewable energy industry is growing jobs more than twice as fast as the overall economy.
This acknowledgement from conservative lawmakers that clean energy and electric vehicles are good business makes it reasonable to bet that the investments they’ve secured for their districts will survive the president-elect’s rhetoric of a “green new scam.”
A lasting irony of the outgoing Biden administration will be how no Republican in Congress voted for the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Yet 85% of the announced clean energy projects and 68% of the jobs triggered by the IRA, such as those related to electric vehicles, wind power, solar power, and battery storage, have gone to Republican-held congressional districts, according to E2, a nonpartisan group that monitors the clean energy industry.
The representatives of those districts see no apparent contradiction in touting the attractiveness of their areas for clean energy investments, while publicly supporting the president-elect’s rhetoric and proposals to end clean energy programs.
Love-Hate Relationships Abound
For instance, Texas Congressmember Jodey Arrington, who represents a House district that includes Lubbock and Abilene, called the IRA a “failed liberal spending spree that crippled our economy and left working American families worse off.” The Washington Postreported in October that Arrington’s district is the nation’s fifth-highest recipient of investments for clean energy and manufacturing, receiving nearly $5 billion.
Then there is Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn: a climate skeptic who says infrastructure projects that fight climate change are a “gateway to socialism.” She told the Republican National Convention this summer that the “green new scam” was “destroying small businesses.”
Huh? Relative to the size of the state’s economy (as measured by gross domestic product), Tennessee ranks firstin the nation in clean technology manufacturing investment from the IRA, according to the Clean Investment Monitor, maintained by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research and the Rhodium Group.
Senator Blackburn seems well aware of it. Even before the IRA, when vehicle maker Ford cut the ribbon on a $5.6 billion electric battery plant in her state in 2021, she boasted how Tennessee is “leading the way for innovation” with a “historic project” that would directly create 5,800 jobs and create “countless opportunities in supporting industries.”
The champion of hypocrisy is Representative Richard Hudson, congressman for North Carolina’s Ninth District, nestled in the center of the state. In voting against the IRA, he blasted clean energy programs as “woke climate and social programs that won’t work.”
Hudson was wide awake for the money coming to his district to expand a massive Toyota battery plant for electric vehicles and hybrids. According to E2, Hudson’s district is top in the nation both for clean energy investment and for clean energy job growth triggered by the IRA. The Toyota plant alone promises more than 5,000 jobs. Estimates of investment in his district range from nearly $10 billion to nearly $13 billion.
Selective Cuts Desired
If the next Trump administration is serious about pulling the plug on clean energy, that will add up to a lot of jobs and investments to undo in states and districts where the president-elect handily won the election. North Carolina Representative Hudson hinted he agrees. When CNNasked him in June if he would vote to repeal the IRA if the Republicans won control of the federal government in the election—which they did—he responded, “Rather than try to repeal one big bill with another big bill, we ought to look at the individual policies.”
Another sign that Republicans ultimately won’t scrap all the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act came in an August letter by 18 Republicans to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). The lawmakers asked Johnson to preserve clean energy tax credits in any effort to repeal or reform the IRA. The letter acknowledged that energy tax credits “have spurred innovation, incentivized investment, and created good jobs in many parts of the country—including many districts represented by members of our conference.”
The letter warned that repealing energy tax credits, especially those for projects that have already broken ground “would undermine private investments and stop development that is already ongoing.”
This acknowledgement from conservative lawmakers that clean energy and electric vehicles are good business makes it reasonable to bet that the investments they’ve secured for their districts will survive the president-elect’s rhetoric of a “green new scam.”
Risks to Offshore Wind Loom
Much less clear is the near-term future for offshore wind.
While campaigning, President-elect Trump promised to sign an executive order on the first day of his return to bring a halt to the offshore wind industry. Never mind that onshore wind is booming in red states in the windy, rural middle of the United States, providing 130,000 jobs. The fastest growing occupation in the nation is wind turbine service technician, paying an average of nearly $62,000 a year according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
According to the Energy Information Agency, the top four states for electricity generation from wind in 2023 were the red states of Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas.
In even more serious doubt is a just transition, where communities that suffer the most from fossil fuel production and pollution can get jobs, lower energy costs, and cleaner air from a move to renewables.
The offshore wind industry, a staple of energy generation in northern Europe, is still in its infancy in the United States. It remains highly vulnerable to price shocks, supply-chain issues, local opposition to siting, and being a political dartboard. The industry is currently centered in more liberal Northeastern states thanks to ideal water depths off the Atlantic coastline and forward-looking governors from Massachusetts to Virginia who have been competing the last two decades for ports and projects.
The U.S. has the technical capacity to harness three times more electricity from offshore wind than it currently uses today, with the Atlantic Ocean off the Northeast coast possessing some of the strongest wind speeds in the country.
Surprisingly, despite its “Drill, Baby, Drill” mantra for oil, the first Trump administration promoted offshore wind when it found out how much money the leases could put into federal coffers. It conducted a then-record auction for waters off Massachusetts to site off-shore wind projects. Ports and manufacturing facilities as far south as Louisiana, home state of House Speaker Mike Johnson, helped launch the nation’s first offshore wind farm in Rhode Island.
But that has not stopped oil and gas companies from continuing to conduct disinformation campaigns to stir up opposition to offshore wind. It is clear they have a lot to lose from a full-blown offshore wind industry in the Northeast. For example, gas accounts for at least half of the electricity generation in New England and New Jersey. New York City generates between 85% and 90% of its electricity from fossil fuels. The Northeast Gas Association boasts that about half the entire region gets its electricity from gas.
On the campaign trail, President-elect Trump elected to play off that disinformation. He attacked offshore wind with gale force lies about its impact on whales and the environment, claims which have zero science behind them as NOAA and others explain.
The unending verbal assault makes it reasonable to worry that under this second administration President-elect Trump may truly try to score political points by directing the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to slow permitting of new projects and telling the Justice Department to side with opponents of incomplete projects. Many experts say that just the slowing of the permitting process risks making construction more expensive and may scare off investors.
Then There’s the Issue of Equity
In even more serious doubt is a just transition, where communities that suffer the most from fossil fuel production and pollution can get jobs, lower energy costs, and cleaner air from a move to renewables.
Almost by definition, the growth of clean energy industries in more sparsely populated, majority white, Republican-held districts may exacerbate the existing structural racism in the energy sector’s workforce, which has been a driver of the Biden administration’s goal of directing 40% of federal climate and clean energy investments to disadvantaged communities.
For instance, Black people are 13% of the nation’s workforce and account for only 8% of the solar and wind workforce, according to the Department of Energy. The Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC) says the percentage of Black solar workers has not budged since 2022. Yet, the second-fastest growing job in the nation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, are solar panel installers, making on average $48,000 a year.
The percentage of people of color in leadership positions in the renewable energy supply chain is currently infinitesimally small. A 2022 report by the American Council on Renewable Energy found that of 658 manufacturers involved in utility-scale wind, solar, and battery storage, 1.8% were owned by people of color or women. And while there is one bright spot in diversity, with 33% of new clean energy jobs last year being filled by Latinos, 88% of solar industry executives are white and 80% are male, according to the IREC.
Only a quarter of solar firms in the IREC’s annual National Solar Jobs Census reported that they had strategies to hire more people of color or women.
With the return of President-elect Trump, accompanied now by Vice President-elect JD Vance, it will take maverick clean energy companies to improve diversity. Just this past June, Vance co-introduced (along with Senator Blackburn) a bill in the Senate to eliminate all federal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and funding for any entities that receive federal funding. Representatives Arrington and Hudson co-sponsored the measure in the House. Cynically twisting the purpose of DEI to ensure fair opportunities for people from historically excluded groups, Vice President-elect Vance claims DEI “breeds hatred and racial division.”
President-elect Trump himself has already begun to nominate members of his cabinet with direct ties to Project 2025, the de facto Republican Party platform that also calls for the elimination of DEI throughout government. Project 2025 explicitly calls for the end of DEI in the Energy Department and eliminating the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights in the Environmental Protection Agency.
The pall placed over the nation is already being felt even before Inauguration Day, as Walmart recently announced it was rolling back DEI policies or dismantling DEI teams, joining companies like Ford, Boeing, Toyota, Lowe’s, Harley Davidson, Molson Coors, John Deere, and Tractor Supply. That follows the scores of universities that are eliminating DEI in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 striking down of affirmative action. It was a ruling virtually assured by President Trump’s packing of the court in his first term.
In a blog last year on this flood of renewable money flowing into Republican districts from a Democratic-inspired law, I wrote that the nation would be so much stronger in the fight against climate change and the effort to clean up communities and boost the economy if conservatives would “drop the two-faced charade of climate denial while diving unabashedly into the pot of federal renewable incentives and tax breaks.” Now that the forces of climate denial have regained the White House and control of both chambers of Congress, they don’t even need two faces. They can just be bald-faced aggrandizers.
The renewable energy industry will indeed have a strong expansion in the U.S. It’s just that it will be heavily driven by a real green scam—an expansion being led by politicians who harness and hoard solar power, wind power, and electric vehicles for their own constituents, but deny it for everyone else.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Is Wyoming’s Wind Boom Really Green?
What consequences will these massive renewable energy projects have on biodiversity and the wild creatures that depend on these lands for survival?
Dec 16, 2024
Like many roads that cut through Wyoming, the highway into the town of Rawlins is a long, winding one surrounded by rolling hills, barbed wire fences, and cattle ranches. I’d traveled this stretch of Wyoming many times. Once during a dangerous blizzard, another time during a car-rattling thunderstorm, the rain so heavy my windshield wipers couldn’t keep pace with the deluge. The weather might be wild and unpredictable in Wyoming’s outback, but the people are friendly and welcoming as long as you don’t talk politics or mention that you live in a place like California.
One late summer afternoon on a trip at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, I stopped off in Rawlins for lunch. There wasn’t a mask in sight, never mind any attempt at social distancing. Two men sat in a booth right behind me, one in a dark suit and the other in overalls, who struck me as a bit of an odd couple. Across from them were an older gentleman and his wife, clearly Rawlins locals. They wondered what those two were up to.
“Are you guys here to work on that massive wind farm?” asked the husband, who clearly had spent decades in the sun. He directed his question to the clean-cut guy in the suit with a straight mustache. His truck, shiny and spotless, was visible out the window, a hardhat and clipboard sitting on the dashboard.
“Yes, we’ll be in and out of town for a few years if things go right. There’s a lot of work to be done before it’s in working order. We’re mapping it all out,” the man replied.
“Well, at least we’ll have some clean energy around here,” the old man said, chuckling. “Finally, putting all of this damned wind to work for once!”
I ate my sandwich silently, already uncomfortable in a restaurant for the first time in months.
“There will sure be a lot of wind energy,” the worker in overalls replied. “But none of it’s for Wyoming.” He added that it would all be directed to California.
“What?!” exclaimed the man as his wife shook her head in frustration. “Commiefornia?! That’s nuts!”
Should Wyoming really be supplying California with wind energy when that state already has plenty of windy options?
Right-wing hyperbole aside, he had a point: It was pretty crazy. Projected to be the largest wind farm in the country, it would indeed make a bundle of electricity, just not for transmission to any homes in Rawlins. The power produced by that future 600-turbine, 3,000 MW Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind farm, with its $5-billion price tag, won’t, in fact, flow anywhere in Colorado, even though it’s owned by the Denver-based Anschutz Corporation. Instead, its electricity will travel 1,000 miles southwest to exclusively supply residents in Southern California.
The project, 17 years in the making and spanning 1,500 acres, hasn’t sparked a whole lot of opposition despite its mammoth size. This might be because the turbines aren’t located near homes, but on privately owned cattle ranches and federal lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Aside from a few raised eyebrows and that one shocked couple, not many people in Rawlins seemed all that bothered. Then again, Rawlins doesn’t have too many folks to bother (population 8,203).
Wyoming was once this country’s coal-mining capital. Now, with the development of wind farms, it’s becoming a major player in clean energy, part of a significant energy transition aimed at reducing our reliance on fossil fuels.
Even so, Phil Anschutz, whose company is behind the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind farms, didn’t get into the green energy game just to save the climate. “We’re doing it to make money,” admits Anschutz, who got the bulk of his billion-dollar fortune from the oil industry. With California’s mandate to end its reliance on fossil fuels by 2045, he now sees a profitable opportunity, and he’s pulling Wyoming along for the ride.
Since 1988, Wyoming has been the country’s top coal-producing state, but its mining has declined steeply over the past 15 years, as has coal mining more generally in the U.S. where 40% of coal plants are set to be shuttered by 2030. In addition to the closed plants, the downturn in coal output has resulted largely from cheap natural gas prices and the influx of utility-scale renewable energy projects. Wyoming’s coal production peaked in 2008, churning out more than 466 million short tons. Today, its mines produce around 288 million short tons of coal, accounting for 40% of America’s total coal mining and supplying around 25% of its power generation. Coal plants are also responsible for more than 60% of carbon dioxide emissions from the country’s power sector. As far as the climate is concerned, that’s still way too much.
The good news is that the U.S. has witnessed a dramatic drop in daily coal use, down 62% since 2008, and few places have felt coal’s rapid decline more than Wyoming, where a green shift is distinctly afoot. Despite being one of the country’s most conservative states (71% of its voters backed U.S. President-elect Donald Trump this year), Wyoming is going all in on wind energy. In 2023, wind comprised 21% of Wyoming’s net energy generation, with 3,100 megawatts, or enough energy to power more than 2.5 million homes. That’s up from 9.4% in 2007.
The Winds of Change
On the surface, Wyoming’s transition from coal to wind is laudable and entirely necessary. When it comes to carbon emissions, coal is by far the nastiest of the fossil fuels. If climate chaos is to be mitigated in any way, coal will have to become a thing of the past and wind will provide a far cleaner alternative. Even so, wind energy has faced its fair share of pushback. A major criticism is that wind farms, like the one outside Rawlins, are blights on the landscape. Even if folks in Rawlins aren’t outraged by the huge wind farm on the outskirts of town, not everyone is on board with Wyoming’s wind rush.
“We don’t want to ruin where we live,” says Sue Jones, a Republican commissioner of Carbon County. “We can call it renewable, we can call it green, but green still has a downside. With wind, it’s visual. We don’t want to destroy one environment to save another.”
Energy from the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind farms will also reach California via a 732-mile transmission line known as the “TransWest Express,” which will feed solar and wind energy to parts of Arizona and Nevada as well. To be completed by 2029, the $3-billion line will travel through four states on public and private land and has been subject to approval by property owners; tribes; and state, federal, and local agencies. The TransWest Express passed the final review process in April 2023 and will become the most extensive interstate transmission line built in the U.S. in decades. As one might imagine, the infrastructure and land required to construct the TransWest Express will considerably impact local ecology. As for the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind farm, it might not encroach on residential neighborhoods, but it does risk destroying some of the best natural wildlife habitats in Wyoming.
Transmission towers connecting thick high-voltage power lines will stand 180 feet tall, slicing through prime sage-grouse, elk, and mule deer habitat and Colorado’s largest concentration of low-elevation wildlands. The TransWest Express will pass over rivers and streams, chop through forests, stretch over hills, and bulldoze its way through scenic valleys. Many believe this is just the price that must be paid to combat our warming climate and that the impact of the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre projects, and the TransWest Express, will be nothing compared to what unmitigated climate chaos will otherwise reap. Some disagree, however, and wonder if such expansive wind farms are really the best we can come up with in the face of climate change.
“This question puts a fine point on the twin looming disasters that humanity has brought upon the Earth: the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis,” argues Erik Molvar, a wildlife biologist and executive director of the Western Watersheds Project, a Hailey, Idaho-based environmental group. “The climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis are of equal importance to humans and every other species with which we share this globe, and it would be foolhardy to ignore either in pursuit of solutions for the other.”
Molver is onto something often overlooked in discussions and debates around our much-needed energy transition: What consequences will these massive renewable energy projects have on biodiversity and the wild creatures that depend on these lands for survival?
Is It Really Clean If It Kills?
Biologists like Mike Lockhart, who worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) for more than 30 years, claim that these large wind farms are more than just an eyesore and will negatively affect wildlife in Wyoming. Raptors, eagles, passerines, bats, and various migrating birds frequently collide with the blades, which typically span 165 feet.
“Most of the [Wyoming wind energy] development is just going off like a rocket right now, and we already have eagles that are getting killed by wind turbines—a hell of a lot more than people really understand,” warns Lockhart, a highly respected expert on golden eagles.
In a recent conversation with Dustin Bleizeffer, a writer for WyoFile, Lockhart warned that wind energy development in Wyoming, in particular, is occurring at a higher rate than environmental assessments can keep up with, which means it could be having damning effects on wild animals. Places with consistent winds, as Lockhart explains, also happen to be prime wildlife habitats, and most of the big wind farms in Wyoming are being built before we know enough about what their impact could be on bird populations.
The Department of Energy projects that wind will generate an impressive 35% of the country’s electricity generation by 2050. If so, upwards of 5 million birds could be killed by wind turbines every year.
In February 2024, FWS updated its permitting process under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, hoping it would help offset some of wind energy’s effects on eagles. The new rules, however, will still allow eagles to die. The new permits for wind turbines won’t even specify the number of eagles allowed to be killed and companies won’t, in fact, be out of compliance even if their wind turbines are responsible for injuring or killing significant numbers of them.
Teton Raptor Center Conservation Director Bryan Bedrosian believes that golden eagle populations in Wyoming are indeed on the decline as such projects only grow and habitats are destroyed—and the boom in wind energy, he adds, isn’t helping matters. “We have some of the best golden eagle populations in Wyoming, but it doesn’t mean the population is not at risk,” he says. “As we increase wind development across the U.S., that risk is increasing.”
It appears that a few politicians in Washington are listening. In October, Reps. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Penn.) introduced a bipartisan bill updating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. The legislation would authorize penalties of up to $10,000 per violation for harm to birds. Still, congressional staffers tell me it’s unlikely to pass, given the quiet lobbying efforts behind the scenes by a motley crew of oil, gas, and wind energy developers.
The Department of Energy projects that wind will generate an impressive 35% of the country’s electricity generation by 2050. If so, upwards of 5 million birds could be killed by wind turbines every year. In addition to golden eagles, the American Bird Conservancy notes that “Yellow-billed Cuckoos, Golden-winged Warblers, and Kirtland’s Warblers are particularly vulnerable. Wind energy poses special risks to endangered or threatened species such as Whooping Cranes and California Condors, since the loss of even a few individuals can have population-level effects.”
And bird kills aren’t the only problem either. The constant drone of the turbines can also impact migration patterns, and the larger the wind farm, the more habitat is likely to be wrecked. The key to reducing such horrors is to try to locate wind farms as far away from areas used as migratory corridors as possible. But as Lockhart points out, that’s easier said than done, as places with steady winds also tend to be environments that traveling birds utilize.
Even though onshore wind farms kill birds and can disrupt habitats, most scientists believe that wind energy must play a role in the world’s much-needed energy transition. Mark Z. Jacobson, author of No Miracles Needed and director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program at Stanford University, notes that the minimal carbon emissions in the life-cycle of onshore wind energy are only outmatched by the carbon footprint of rooftop solar. It would be extremely difficult, he points out, to curtail the world’s use of fossil fuels without embracing wind energy.
Scientists are, however, devising novel ways to reduce the collisions that cause such deaths. One method is to paint the blades of the wind turbines black to increase their visibility. A recent study showed that doing so instantly reduces bird fatalities by 70%.
Such possibilities are promising, but shouldn’t wind project creators also do as much as possible to site their energy projects as close to their consumers as they can? Should Wyoming really be supplying California with wind energy when that state already has plenty of windy options—in and around Los Angeles, for example, on thousands of acres of oil and brownfield sites that are quite suitable for wind or solar farms and don’t risk destroying animal habitats by constructing hundreds of miles of power lines?
Wind energy from Wyoming will not finally reach California until the end of the decade. As Phil Anschutz reminds us, it’s all about money, and land in Los Angeles, however battered and bruised, would still be a far cheaper and less destructive way to go than parceling out open space in Wyoming.
Wind Is Still a Resource
In that roadside cafe in Rawlins, the two workers paid their bill and left. I sat there quietly, wondering what that couple made of the revelation that the wind farm nearby wasn’t going to benefit them. Finally, nodding toward the men’s truck as it drove away, I asked, “What do you think of that?”
“Same old, same old,” the guy eventually replied. “Reminds me of the coal industry, the oil industry, you name it. The big city boys come and take our resources and we end up having little to show for it.”
Shortly after lunch, I left Rawlins and made my way two hours north to the Pioneer Wind Farm near the little town of Glenrock that began operating in 2011. I pulled over to get some fresh air and stretch my legs. As I exited the car, I could hear the steady hum of turbines slicing through the air above me and I didn’t have to walk very far before I nearly stepped on a dead hawk in the early stages of decay. I had no way of knowing how the poor critter was killed, but it was hard to imagine that the hulking blade swirling overhead didn’t have something to do with it.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular