Massive volumes of wind-generated electricity from Wyoming will reach California and other southwestern states. Colorado? It’s on the path—but like an interstate with no exits or on-ramps for hundreds of miles.
by Allen Best
Moffat County, in northwestern Colorado, will soon become buzz-over country as construction has begun on one high-voltage transmission line and, on April 11, the The Bureau of Land Management issued a permit for a second, even higher-capacity line.
The two transmission lines will export massive amounts of wind-generated electricity from giant, new wind farms under construction along Interstate 80 in southern Wyoming to energy consumers in California and other southwestern states. Neither will enable renewable generation in northwest Colorado.
In the short term, this will make Craig a boom town once again. Already motels and hotels report plenty of construction crews in town, at least some of them to work on the $2.1 billion Gateway South line. Although snow has slowed the work, ground has been broken and foundations laid in several locations, a spokesman for Rocky Mountain Power, subsidiary of PacifiCorp, confirmed.
The transmission line is part of PacifiCorp’s plans to add 2,000 miles of high-voltage power lines to five other Western states in PacifiCorp’s service territory.
This particular 416-mile line crossing Moffat County will harvest wind in Wyoming from turbines near Medicine Bow—yes, “When you call me that, smile”—and deliver it to a substation in central Utah. PacifiCorp has said it expects to have that line completed in 2024.
The other transmission line crossing Moffat County, the 732-mile TransWest Express, will convey wind-generated electricity near Rawlins, Wyo., to a switchyard at Delta, Utah. From there, the electricity can be delivered in various ways to Arizona, Nevada, and California, including the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power system. The transmission line will cost $3 billion.
Interesting elements abound in this beginning with the capacity of these transmission lines.
The Gateway South has 500 kV capacity. That’s more than any existing power lines in Colorado, where capacity tops out at 345kV. TransWest Express is even greater, 600 kV, using an old but high-capacity technology. Think of the first one, Gateway South, the line now under construction, as being like a 6-lane highway. Think of the second line, TransWest Express, being like a 20-lane highway without any on-ramps or off-ramps for hundreds of miles.
Extensive transmission was built as a result of the three coal burning units at Craig that went on line between 1979 and 1982. The TransWest Express (see top map) and Gateway South lines ill bisect Moffat County, most generally from north to south, to the west of Craig in Moffat County. Photo/Allen Best
There’s the wind itself. The TransWest Express will transmit electricity from not quite 600 wind turbines in the adjoining Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind projects in Wyoming. Turbines are to be placed equally on private and federal land in the landscape south of Interstate 80 and west of the resort town of Saratoga.
Together, these turbines will be capable of generating 3,000 megawatts, making this the largest onshore wind energy facility in the United States.
This compares with the collective nameplate generating capacity in Colorado of the Craig, Hayden, Rawhide, Pawnee and Nixon coal-fired power plants of 2,721 megawatts. They’re not always operating of course. For that matter, in theory the wind doesn’t always blow in southern Wyoming. Those who have spent time there can be pardoned for thinking otherwise.
In a 2022 story published by WyoFile.net, Jonathan Naughton, professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Wind Energy Research Center at the University of Wyoming, said several regions have “wind capacity factors” of more than 50%, compared to 35% in other interior states. “That means that the turbines that they put up are running at full capacity more often,” Naughton said.
It’s some of the best (or worst, depending upon your perspective) wind in the continental United States.
Wyoming wind also tends to be more consistent during winter months and during evening hours throughout the year, explained Wyofile’s Dustin Bleizeffer. That means that when solar power generation drops off in the evenings in California, Wyoming wind can backfill the power supply.
The same dynamic applies between eastern Wyoming and Colorado’s Front Range urban corridor.
“There’s some attractive things about combining solar and wind from Wyoming,” Naughton said. “And if you build out a really robust transmission system, it’s easy to move power around, and it solves a lot of these issues with variability.”
HVDC a first!
Another element of interest in this TransWest Express line is that it will employ high-voltage direct current. Most of our electrical grid operates on alternating current. High-voltage direct current offers advantages at longer distances, because less electricity is lost from DC transmission lines, explained Power magazine in a 2018 article.
“HVDC is the technology of choice for reliability and efficiently transmitting large amounts of power over long distances with minimal losses. It is ideal for integrating remote renewable energy into the power grid,” said Claudio Facchin, president of ABB’s Power Grids Division, in a press release about a project connecting a wind farm along the coast of Netherlands with Germany.
The technology is well established but the cost is high, because of the need for costly conversion stations at both ends. By one estimate, this limits application of the technology to lines of 300 miles or more.
TransWest Express will be the first major use of HVDC technology in the United States to deliver on-shore wind power and will significantly advance the nation’s net-zero goals,” said Tim Holt, member of the executive board of Siemens Energy, which has the contract to deploy its technology in the new transmission line. Siemens calls its technology HVDC Plus.
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The third major element in this story lies in the switch from fossil fuels to renewables. It exists in at least a couple of dimensions.
The Power Company of Wyoming, the company developing the two closely located wind projects in Carbon County that will produce electricity for the TransWest Express line, is a subsidiary of the Denver-based Anschutz Corp. So is TransWest Express.
The owner is Philip Anschutz, who came from a Kansas family of oil drillers and who went on to amass a fortune by harvesting oil from the Overthrust Belt in southwestern Wyoming. (And this writer, when a relative youngster, worked on a surveying crew that assisted his ambitions). Forbes estimates his net worth at $10.1 billion.
In a 2019 profile by Forbes, Anschutz said his big bet on wind isn’t motivated by climate concerns first and foremost. Instead, it was triggered by California’s law mandating a shift to 100% renewable energy by 2045.
“We’re doing it to make money,” he said.
Anschutz, 83, also built his fortune in railroads, telecom, real estate, and entertainment. His Anschutz Entertainment Group operates more than 350 owned or affiliated arenas and concert venues around the world. That includes the FirstBank Center in Broomfield, the Gothic Theater in Englewood, and the Bluebird and Ogden venues on East Colfax in Denver, among others, plus the Aspen Snowmass Jazz Festival; Anschutz has also owned sports teams in Los Angeles.
WyoFile also notes that wind now accounts for nearly a third of Wyoming’s total electrical generation capacity— and these big wind farms are yet to come on line. This compares with 2003, when coal accounted for 97% of the state’s power generation.
An additional 6,000 megawatts of new wind power capacity may come on line in Wyoming by 2030, the WyoFile story says, citing “those close to the industry.”
Most of Wyoming’s electricity is exported to other states. In the case of Rocky Mountain Power, owner of several coal plants, it’s 85%.
Why so long?
A fourth salient element is how long it took both companies to move forward—and why transmission is altogether so difficult almost no matter where it is. It takes deep pockets and time. In the case of PacifiCorp, it is owned by Berkshire-Hathaway whose most significant figure has a home in Omaha.
The effort by Anschutz’s TransWest and his related wind company started in 2008. There were many problems. As the New York Times and others have suggested, the United States needs to revamp its environmental impact process created by the National Environmental Policy Act. But the transmission line from Wyoming to the Southwest was most significantly snagged by one landowner in Moffat County.
In 2021, Bloomberg sent a team of reporters and photographers to describe what was going on. Their 3,000-word story, titled “The Clean-Power Megaproject Held Hostage by a Ranch and a Bird,” took readers to the Cross Mountain Ranch. They described it as “one of the last pieces of a historic American West that’s since been eaten up by subdivision and strip malls. It’s also been a burr under the saddle of one of the richest men in the world.”
That would be Anschutz, of course.
The Yampa River flows through Cross Mountain in something of a geologic curiosity in northwestern Colorado. Photo October 2020/Allen Best
The 56,000-acre ranch located near where the Yampa River enters Dinosaur National Park is owned by the family of the late Ronald Boeddeker, a real estate developer who purchased it in the early 1990s. Matt Boeddeker, a son, started trying to get a conservation easement in a key location in 2012. This, says the Bloomberg story, is a year after TransWest made public its plans for power-line corridors running through the ranch. The family teamed up with the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust, which would actually hold the easement. (Full disclosure, this writer has contributed small donations to that land trust).
The conflict described is between conservation and … well, conservation, if you think that preventing emissions is exactly that. The Bloomberg story, though, does suggest skepticism about the motives. Sammy Roth of the Los Angeles Times in 2021 also visited the topic of tensions between conservation and renewable energy build out.
In December 2021, the impasse was resolved. Citing a filing in U.S. District Court, S&P Market Intelligence explained that developers of both transmission lines had reached an agreement with Cross Mountain. The settlement specified that the ranch and the cattlemen’s land trust would grant easements for both transmission lines—provided the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service approves applications to waive interest in the easements. If there were other terms—and surely there were —they were not disclosed.
That same story said that a notice to proceed was expected in early 2022. In fact, it was April 2023.
The projects could play a key role in slashing U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from electricity production. U.S. President Joe Biden has called for decarbonizing the country’s power grid by 2035, and many Western states have set ambitious goals to lower or eliminate emissions from the electric sector.
But industry experts have said Biden’s goal cannot be reached without a major build-out in transmission capacity that would link renewable energy-rich parts of the country with more populated areas.
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I hope every 1 of those damn wind turbines fall down.
Great article! Thank you. I’m sure Carbon County, Rawlins,WY will reap the benefits of these project, if the powers that be understand the economic and environmental benefits! Fingers crossed. Hopefully the State will approve a 10% increase of rates by Rocky Mtn Power, not 21% to fund it!
At one point, a route down Hwy 13 from Baggs to Craig was considered for at least one of these powerlines. I believe the city of Craig objected. Apparently no acceptable route around Craig could be found. It seems like that would have avoided the conserved land, and perhaps added to opportunities for Craig Station to transition from coal to energy storage.
Too bad it’s so expensive to bury these lines onshore. Offshore they are buried but the wet sediments carry away the heat. In any case, good to see this project come to fruition. Hopefully the latest in raptor sensing for turbine blade braking, and aircraft sensing to activate the lights only when needed, will be used on the wind turbines.