Wyoming

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This summary is part of Beyond the Beltway: A Report on State Energy and Climate Policies produced by the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at Berkeley Law

 

Wyoming is one of the nation’s leading coal producers. Yet surprisingly, the Cowboy State leads the nation in wind power per capita, and all of its new generation capacity from 2016 to 2019 will be wind.[1] According to a University of Wyoming study, these new facilities will bring substantial financial benefits to the state, including “more than $700 million in tax revenue to local governments, more than $400 million to the state and more than $700 million to Wyoming schools, all over a 20-year period.”[2]

The politics surrounding renewables in Wyoming are quite interesting. As the Casper Star Tribune explains: “Though [renewable] industry interest in Wyoming has flourished, the state, through its policies, has maintained a fierce loyalty to fossil fuel industries, which contribute billions of dollars in tax revenue to state and local coffers.”[3]

As a measure of the strength of the fossil fuel lobby (and, perhaps, of Tea Party ideology), Wyoming has actually been considering legislation to raise taxes on renewables and perhaps ban the sale of wind power in the state. In the end, the legislative push seems to have fizzled, at least for now.[4] At the same time, Microsoft recently made a deal to supply its new data center in Cheyenne with up to 50% renewable energy. In fact, according to the Energy Information Administration, Wyoming gets nearly 10% of its power from wind, making it 15th in the nation.

The Republican Party has overwhelming control of the state legislature, and President Trump carried the state the state by a whopping 50% margin. Still, in the end, it looks like economics may trump Trump.

 

  1. Heather Richards, “New Wind Puts Wyoming Top of the List for Renewables, but the Reality is More Complicated,” Casper Star Tribune (April 24, 2017), http://trib.com/business/energy/new-wind-puts- wyoming-top-of-the-list-for-renewables/article_e52050d0-73f6-5a53-b5f6-946d8107aee4.html.
  2. Robert Godby et al., “An Assessment of Wyoming’s Competitiveness to Attract New Wind Development,” University of Wyoming Center for Energy Economics and Public Policy (September 2016), http://www.uwyo.edu/cee/_files/docs/201609_wyoming-wind-competitiveness.pdf.
  3. Heather Richards, “New Wind Puts Wyoming Top of the List for Renewables, but the Reality is More Complicated,” Casper Star Tribune (April 24, 2017), http://trib.com/business/energy/new-wind-puts- wyoming-top-of-the-list-for-renewables/article_e52050d0-73f6-5a53-b5f6-946d8107aee4.html.
  4.  “The Largest Wind Farm in the U.S. is Being Built in Wyoming, and Lawmakers Want to Raise Wind Tax,” Clean Technica (July 15, 2017), https://cleantechnica.com/2017/07/15/largest-wind-farm-us-built-wyoming-lawmakers-want-raise-wind-tax/.