Sammy Roth , The Desert Sun
You wouldn't expect Philip Anschutz to build America's biggest wind farm.
Anschutz is one of the country's richest people, with an estimated net worth of $12 billion. He owns or holds major stakes in Regal Cinemas, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, among many other music festivals, sports franchises and event venues. He co-founded Major League Soccer, and he once bought and sold the Southern Pacific Railroad.
He's also a big player in conservative politics. He owns two influential right-leaning magazines, the Weekly Standard and the Washington Examiner, and he's given at least $1.8 million to help elect Republicans across the country over the last two years, according to campaign-finance records.
Anschutz owes his fortune to fossil fuels. He got his start in the oil and gas industry in the early 1960s, taking over his father's drilling company and eventually discovering a massive untapped oil field under a ranch he'd bought in Utah. He sold a stake in that oil field to Mobil Corporation for a reported $500 million, then used that money to launch his other business ventures.
These days, fossil fuels are a small piece of the Anschutz empire. In fact, there wasn't a drill rig in sight as Bill Miller, who oversees Anschutz's oil and gas business, maneuvered his Ford Raptor off-road truck through the rugged, snowy hills of Overland Trail Ranch in south-central Wyoming on a bitterly cold December morning. Clad in a cowboy hat befitting his long history as an oil and gas "land man," Miller explained that the 500-square-mile ranch is roughly the size of Los Angeles — and that it's home to some of the most powerful onshore winds in the continental United States.
Anschutz owns the ranch and raises cattle there. When Miller suggested 10 years ago that he build a wind farm and send the electricity to California, the conservative billionaire didn't hesitate.
"It’s just a natural resource," Miller said, when asked if it's awkward for a fossil fuel magnate like Anschutz to try his hand at renewable energy. "Raising a cow is a natural resource. Growing a commodity in a farmer’s field is a natural resource. And we’re a resource-based company."
A decade later, Miller is nailing down the final government permits for Chokecherry and Sierra Madre, which at 3,000 megawatts would be the country's largest wind project. He plans to build 1,000 turbines, each of them 262 feet high, along with a 730-mile power line to get the electricity to California. He needs to send the energy out of state because Wyoming doesn't have enough people to use it. California is ideal because of its huge population, and because it's trying to get half of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, part of a wide-ranging strategy to fight climate change.
For Anschutz, building a wind farm is a simple proposition. He thinks he can make money doing it.
But for conservative Wyoming politicians sympathetic to the state's struggling coal industry — and for California leaders who see Wyoming wind as a tantalizing resource — nothing is simple.
California Gov. Jerry Brown is pushing state lawmakers to approve a controversial plan to link California's electric grid with Warren Buffett's PacifiCorp utility, which serves five other western states. That could lead to California getting more wind power from Wyoming and sending more solar energy to its neighbors. But critics say Brown's six-state strategy could inadvertently lead to California losing control of its energy policies and propping up coal plants in Utah and Wyoming, polluting the climate in the process. California's Legislature is expected to take up the proposal this year.
The North Platte River flows through Overland Trail Ranch, which ranges from 6,000 to 9,000 feet in elevation in Wyoming's Carbon County — so named for the coal that was once mined there.
Bill Miller was 59 years old when he first pitched Anschutz on building a wind farm at the ranch. As the longtime head of the Denver-based Anschutz Corporation's oil and gas business, Miller also oversaw the company's agribusiness, and he'd been trying to sell Overland Trail Ranch. But as he read more and more about growth opportunities in renewable energy, a light bulb went off.
"The Rockies are bigger to the south, they're bigger to the north, and this is just kind of the funnel through the Rockies for the west-to-east wind patterns," Miller said as he drove through thick snow up Miller Hill (not named for him), which has some of the ranch's strongest winds. A few minutes later, he would get out of the truck, and a powerful gust would knock his cowboy hat off.
In Wyoming, meanwhile, the economic importance of fossil fuels, and fury over the Obama administration's climate policies, threaten to derail the fledgling wind industry. Wyoming is already the only state in the country to tax wind energy, and some lawmakers are working to raise the tax. The Anschutz Corporation has fought a tax increase, warning it might not be able to build its project.
As Donald Trump takes office, California and the West face a series of decisions that will shape their energy and environmental futures, and their ability to take action against climate change. To understand those decisions, you have to start on a windswept ranch in rural Wyoming, with an oilman in a cowboy hat building his first renewable energy project for a conservative billionaire.
Now 69, Miller is still a few years away from seeing the first turbines go up at the ranch. He's amazed the environmental review process has taken this long. He tells a story about a Bureau of Land Management employee, back at the beginning, who looked him in the eye and told him, "This is going to take five years." Miller remembers thinking, "How the heck could this take five years?"
Looking back, Miller blames regulations stemming from the National Environmental Policy Act, which "have just grown and grown and grown, to the point where it's a regulatory nightmare," he said.
The ranch sits on a mix of private, state and federal lands. The federal land approval process has been the most difficult.
In January 2008, the Anschutz subsidiary developing the project applied for a right-of-way permit from the federal Bureau of Land Management. The agency began analyzing every manner of environmental impact, from bird deaths and ground-level habitat disruption to dust emissions during construction, disturbance of Native American artifacts and visual changes to the landscape.
The biggest obstacle, by far, was potential damage to the greater sage grouse, a chicken-like bird known for its colorful mating rituals, whose habitat stretches across 173 million acres in the West. Sage grouse populations have been declining for decades, and for several years the Obama administration was considering protecting the bird under the Endangered Species Act. That could have hamstrung oil and gas drilling, ranching and other economic activity, a possibility that sent some western states into a frenzy as they negotiated with federal officials to avoid that outcome.
The Interior Department ultimately chose
not to list the sage grouse under the Endangered Species Act, striking a 10-state deal in 2015 to protect the bird's habitat while leaving room for development. But whatever decision the Obama administration might have made, Miller knew that concern over the fate of the greater sage grouse could sink his project.
So despite his frustrations with the environmental review, Miller made sage grouse protection a priority. He worked closely with the Audubon Society to identify critical habitat on the ranch, outfitting about 100 birds with expensive radio transmitters and hiring scientists to track their movements across the property. His team has done at least half a dozen major redesigns as a result, moving proposed turbine locations to avoid sensitive areas. Miller said the wind project will generate a lot less electricity as a result, since those sensitive areas have some of the strongest winds.
Even with a sage grouse plan in place, building the wind farm won't be easy. In a small trailer that serves as the project's on-site office, a map pinned to the wall shows the extensive restrictions that will be placed on construction. Colorful circles denote areas where the Anschutz subsidiary developing the project, the Power Company of Wyoming, won't be able to build during certain months, so as to protect sage grouse, raptors, eagles, elk, mule deer and pronghorn. Big stretches of the map are blank, showing areas where no turbines will be built.
But those safeguards haven't fully satisfied conservationists.
Brian Rutledge, the Audubon Society's Central Flyway conservation strategy and policy adviser, praised the Anschutz team for its work to protect sage grouse and other birds, noting the company has also studied eagle flight patterns and moved turbines out of heavily trafficked routes. But while the developer has "really been at the forefront" of finding ways to limit bird deaths, Rutledge said he's still skeptical of current wind technology, since it's impossible to eliminate all impacts.
"We have a lot of other challenges for our bird life already, and we don't need to add to it in a way that is crippling," he said. "We need to go back to the drawing board a bit on the structure of a wind farm. There must be other ways of generating electricity with wind that aren't going to be in direct conflict with avian visitors."
entire article:
http://www.desertsun.com/story/tech/science/energy/2017/02/01/wyoming-wind-philip-anschutz/95452488/