could bear a tax on energy production.
Michael Madden, a Republican state leg-
islator from northern Wyoming, helped
shepherd a proposal for a tax on every
megawatt-hour generated by wind. Min-
nesota was the only other state with such a
tax, but that was levied instead of a prop-
erty tax on wind farms; Wyoming was con-
sidering adding the generation tax on top
of an existing property tax.
The idea didn’t seem all that edgy to
Madden. Mining companies pay severance
taxes for “severing” minerals from the land,
and the way Madden saw it, wind farms
were severing something too—the state’s
picturesque landscape. Turbines, jutting up
into the horizon, are a stain on the state’s
rolling hills, mountain ranges, and big open
skies, he argued. “The pristine nature of the
state,” he said, was being violated.
Renewable energy proponents flooded
the halls of the state capitol with counter-
arguments, contending the tax would
impede the growth of a new industry, one
that could bring new jobs, albeit not as
many as coal. They also noted that coal
extraction, with its gaping strip mines that
slice across the terrain, disturbs the land-
scape too.
In the end, the legislature passed a
$1-per-megawatt-hour tax, to be imposed
after a three-year grace period. It was
lower than the $3 tax Madden had wanted,
but it was not the only one levied on wind.
The lawmakers also let a sales tax exemp-
tion on renewable energy equipment, like
turbines, expire in 2009—which made
construction costs more expensive. Wind
proponents argued that the state effectively
had imposed three taxes on the industry—
on sales, on generation, and on property.
Across the country, meanwhile, the
Obama administration was trying to
encourage wind energy projects by extend-
ing federal tax credits. Wind farm devel-
opers chose other states with steady wind
and more hospitable legislatures.
From 2011 to 2017, while wind farms
proliferated throughout the US, not a sin-
gle company completed a new utility-scale
wind project in Wyoming. The tax “had a
chilling effect on some developers wanting
to invest more in the state,” says Tom Darin,
senior director of Western state affairs for
the American Wind Energy Association, a
trade group. At least one developer that
was already working in Wyoming, Duke
Energy, took its new efforts elsewhere,
investing $3 billion in other states.
While wind development came to
a standstill, calamity struck the state’s
main sources of revenue. In the decade
since Wyoming’s 2009 legislative ses-
sion, coal production has fallen. In the
first quarter of 2019, it was down about
30 percent compared with 10 years ago—
despite the Trump administration’s repeal
of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which
aimed to reduce emissions from fossil
fuels. No one is predicting a turnaround.
Last fall, two of the state’s largest min-
ing companies filed for Chapter11 bank-
ruptcy, leaving nearly 600 miners withouta job overnight. “We’re seeing the death of
an industry the state has depended on for
decades,” says Robert Godby, deputy direc-
tor of the Center for Energy Regulation Pol-
icy at the University of Wyoming. (Coal paid
$199 million in Wyoming severance taxes
in 2018; the power generation tax on the
state’s wind farms brings in about $4mil-
lion a year.)
“It’s not the wind turbines that are knock-
ing coal off the grid,” Godby says; but the
mining crash has, if anything, only hard-
ened the affinity for fossil fuels. In Wyoming,
odds are you’re never more than a person
or two removed from someone making a
living on coal. Renewables have come to
be regarded as an existential rival. Hesid
Brandow, community organizer for the
Powder River Basin Resource Council in
Sheridan, Wyoming, told me about ranch-
ers who had quietly installed solar arrays;
they liked the self-sufficiency and practical-
ity but asked her not to mention to anyone
that they had them.
There is truth to the idea that renewables
are beginning to rival fossil fuels, even in
Wyoming. Coal still accounts for 24 per-
cent of the energy consumed in the US
(and Wyoming coal for about 11 percent).
But wind and other renewable sources are
catching up, in large part because their cost
is coming down. Wind, the fastest-growing
source of renewable energy in the US, now
compares favorably to both coal and natural
gas. According to a 2019 analysis conducted
by the financial advisory firm Lazard, coal
costs between $66 and $152 per megawatt-
hour of electricity generated, natural gas
costs between $44 and $68, and wind is
between $28 and $54.
One reason costs have come down over
the years is that turbine technology has
steadily improved. Blade heads with sen-
sors and 360-degree rotation can make the
most of wind coming from any direction.
Turbines have also grown taller and their
blades longer; taller towers help in some
regions, like the Southeast, by lifting the
mechanism above the tree line, and bigger“I’ve been asked
several times,
‘How much natural
gas do you have
to pump up there
to get those things
spinning?’”_ITER, Latin for “the way,” is on pace to begin testing the world’s largest fusion-power project in 2025. The plasma in the
machine’s core could reach 270 million degrees and produce 500 megawatts of thermal power.