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he put it, “drilled wells from North Dakota
clear down to Arizona.” That lasted about
five years, before the region’s oil industry
went bust. Anderson spent the next two
decades on dude ranches, entertaining
tourists on horseback rides and fly-fish-
ing adventures. When he and his wife sent
their two kids off to college, he started
looking for a new challenge. PacifiCorp
happened to have an opening in renew-
ables. “So that’s what we did,” he says. His
first job was to help build Glenrock.
Casey Collins, who is Glenrock’s day-to-
day manager, is riding along in the pickup
for the wind farm tour. He too was a former
oil-field worker, and I wondered if the guys
from his oil days give him a hard time for
taking a job in renewables. “I get shit all
the time!” he tells me. “Most of it’s based
on misconceptions and ignorance, to be
honest. I’ve been asked several times, ‘How
much natural gas do you have to pump up
there to get those things spinning?’”↙
JUST OVER A DECADE AGO, IN THE LATE
2000s, the wind prospectors arrived in
Wyoming. A New York Times piece from
2008 compared them to the brash oilmen
snatching up acreage and drilling rights in
the film There Will Be Blood. They drove
miles out into the country, knocking on the
doors of ranchers and other landowners,
trying to secure easements that would be
needed to construct future wind projects.
It was the pit of the Great Recession, and
for many Wyoming ranchers those deals
were welcome news. PacifiCorp, in a joint
venture with two other utility companies,
had built the first full-scale wind farm back
in 1999. Ten years later, the sector seemed
primed to lift off.
In Cheyenne, the state capital, how-
ever, the prospectors were about to get
schooled. Lawmakers at the gold-domed
capitol building studied reports by con-
sultants who suggested that Wyoming’s
wind was so superior that the industrycentral Wyoming than just about anywhere
else in the US. And yet compared to Texas,
Iowa, California, and several areas across
the Great Plains, Wyoming lags far behind
in wind development, ranking 16th for
installed wind capacity. Glenrock stands
in a state where renewable energy has
been, if not quite embattled, then stigma-
tized and viewed with contempt. And the
reason for this cold reception is, in a way,
written on the landscape of Glenrock itself.
Anderson shifts the truck into gear and
starts up a hill. Up high, you get a better
sense of the wind farm’s scope: 158 steel
turbines that look like pinwheels copied
and pasted into neat rows across 14,000
acres. You also get a sense of its backstory.
Constructed in 2008, Glenrock was the first
wind farm in the country to be built on top
of a reclaimed coal mine—a feat of modern
engineering that doubles as a particularly
on-the-nose metaphor for the transfor-
mation that Wyoming has been reluctant
to embrace. “Right here on our left, this
was an open pit,” Anderson says, pointing
to a rolling field.
Wyoming’s attachment to fossil fuels
runs deep. For more than a century, rough-
necks have been scraping through layers of
Wyoming’s topsoil, mining coal and drill-
ing for oil. In the 1980s, the state’s coal
sometimes accounted for a quarter of the
energy consumed by the entire coun-
try. Coal mining jobs brought pride and a
middle-class lifestyle. Taxes and royalty
payments from subterranean resources
have paved the state’s roads and built its
schools. So when the wind industry came
along, it was greeted by many with a mix
of uncertainty (because it was new), deri-
sion (because it was “green”), and fiscal
opportunism (because energy has always
been the state’s golden goose).
Many of the people who work in Wyo-
ming’s wind sector have themselves made
the transition from livelihoods defined by
fossil fuels. Anderson graduated from the
University of Wyoming with a degree in
petroleum engineering in 1984 and then, asRENEW
A MASSIVE WIND TURBINE RISES INTO THE
air about 60 yards from where I stand.
Silhouetted against an endless blue sky,
the structure is taller than the Statue of
Liberty, and the tips of its three blades
spin more than 150 miles per hour, fast
enough to complete one revolution every
four seconds or so. Looking up at it from
the ground is disorienting; I feel as if I’ve
shrunk. Even the Ford F-250 pickup I’m
about to climb into—one of those mon-
sters with a roaring engine and an extra
bar to help you step up into the cab—seems
miniature. I listen, but if the turbine itself
is making a hum or whir, I can’t hear it
over the relentless pounding of the wind,
a white noise accompanied by the sound
of the air snapping against the loose fab-
ric of my jacket.
Opposite me, on the driver’s side of the
pickup, is Laine Anderson, director of wind
operations at PacifiCorp, a public utility
company that powers more than 140,000
square miles across six Western states.
As I move to hop in the truck, Anderson
cautions me to watch my door. He’s never
actually seen one blow off a vehicle, but
PacifiCorp does cover the possibility in
safety training.
The wind farm we’re touring today is
called Glenrock, one of nine that Pacifi-
Corp operates in Wyoming; they are among
the more ideally situated wind farms in
the US. Wyoming’s topography—a series
of mountain ranges and plateaus spread
diagonally across the state—creates a sort
of natural funnel. In some towns near the
end of that funnel, the gusts are so strong
and persistent that trees noticeably lean
to the east. In fact, the wind blows harder
and with more regularity here in south-
_Berkeley’s 2019 ban on natural gas in new buildings has spurred more than 50 California cities to draft similar legislation.