By Mark Peters and Rebecca Smith | The Wall Street Journal
Wyoming has strong winds and a sparse population, making it a great place to put wind turbines but a lousy place to sell wind energy.
So a determined group of wind-energy developers are pushing plans to turn the state into a top producer of wind power in the U.S.—up from No. 14 as of the end of 2012, according to the American Wind Energy Association—with the goal of shipping the electricity primarily to the Southwest, including California.
Bill Miller, head of two wind-power firms owned by billionaire Philip Anschutz, on the proposed site of what would be the largest U.S. wind farm.
Billionaire Philip Anschutz aims to build the largest U.S. wind farm on his 500-square-mile cattle ranch near here and send the energy to the Southwest via a proposed $3 billion power line dubbed the TransWest Express. Roughly 150 miles east, near Chugwater, Wyo., a consortium of investors, ranchers and utilities are planning a comparably sized wind farm and transmission line named Zephyr.
The Wyoming projects, stretching across high-desert lands dotted with sagebrush, have a key element in favor of success: the potential access to California, the biggest market for renewable electricity in the U.S. While access to California isn’t guaranteed, the state’s investor-owned utilities are required by law to buy one-third of their electricity from green resources by 2020. That means wind competes with other sources of green power, not cheaper sources such as natural gas and coal, and gives the Wyoming projects a fighting chance.
Related: The Cost of Wind Energy: Part II
