From KUNC

In Wyoming, a Careful Balance Between Wind Power and Sage Grouse

By Molly Messick, KUNC, 7-28-10

	Sage Grouse. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

LARAMIE, WY (KUNC) - Wyoming is a prime place for wind development. Some of the best quality winds in the country blow across its miles of sagebrush and range land. But the state is also home to more than half of the remaining greater sage grouse. That’s a rare game bird that came close to being listed as an endangered species earlier this year. Ensuring its protection has at times conflicted with the national push for more green energy.

Bill Miller is standing on high ground, on the top of a rock formation called the Bolton Rim. He faces into the wind and holds up a small device, about the size of a cell phone.

“Seeing how hard the wind’s blowing,” he says.

Miller works for the Denver-based Anschutz Corporation, and he’s in charge of the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project. He’s surrounded by rugged rock and rolling hills that stretch to the horizon. Here, a 20-mile-an-hour wind is nothing more than a gentle breeze.

“It’s blowing,” Miller confirms. “It’s about nine meters per second.”

This swath of open ranchland in south-central Wyoming is roughly the size of metro Los Angeles. Before long, it could be home to the biggest wind farm in the United States.

But when Bill Miller looks back at the last year, he looks back at a lot of uncertainty. Most days he had no idea whether this multibillion dollar project would go forward, or be stopped dead in its tracks.

“We’re still not sure,” he says, “Literally, we were doing new configurations and new modeling of our project almost on a daily basis.”

That’s because strong winds aren’t the only thing that makes this land valuable. It’s a vast area of sagebrush that’s home to everything from antelope and elk to eagles. And - the greater sage grouse. More than 90% of the birds have vanished over the last century.

A ‘Landscape Species’

A male sage grouse’s mating ritual during the spring is quite a scene. They inflate white, sacks along their bellies, and strut and sing to attract the hens. You have to get up before dawn to see this, in wide open sage brush country.

“This is very much a landscape species. It takes a great deal of space to exist,” says Brian Rutledge, Executive Director of Audubon Wyoming.

He’s part of a team put together by democratic Governor Dave Freudenthal. The plan they’ve created for conserving the sage grouse prohibits wind development across nearly 1/4 of the state. Originally, that included a big section of the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind farm. Rutledge says there’s good logic for keeping wind development away from sage grouse.

“To the little old pea-sized sage grouse brain which has been around for about 40 million years doing the same thing, it says, high thing overhead: bad. Movement overhead: bad. Traffic: bad. Activity: bad,’” Rutledge says.

And wind turbines? They’re bad, too, according to Rutledge. He says the key to preserving the sage grouse is preserving its sagebrush habitat. He says there’s no doubt that wind development is bad for the bird.

Science Untested

But others say the evidence isn’t so clear.

“With wind, we just don’t have the data,” says Ryan Lance, deputy chief of staff to Governor Freudenthal. “Anecdotally it says there’s a big impact and we just don’t know, whereas with the other industries we do.”

Compared to the mining and oil and gas industries, wind power development is relatively new in the west. There isn’t definitive, before and after research that shows how sage grouse respond to wind farms. And in the absence of that kind of evidence, federal wildlife officials say building wind farms over the birds’ heads isn’t the best way of protecting them. Given that, Wyoming is playing it safe.

Lance says a big reason is money, “I would absolutely say that we’re protecting our cash cow., because I think we have to.”

An endangered species listing could affect ranching, tourism, mining and oil and gas activity statewide. And that could easily cost the state tens of millions of dollars each year.

“If we’re going to build schools in this state, if we’re going to keep people employed in the mines and in the oil and gas fields, which is where most of our tax base is generated and where a lot of good jobs in the state are, I think we have to do that,” Lance says. “That’s an obligation of the governor.”

A Push for Certainty

So the governor’s sage grouse team has mapped the entire state, identified the best habitat, and set limits for development within those areas. The governor’s office says that should give all the industries more certainty going forward. That includes wind development, and people like Bill Miller.

“We feel relatively comfortable where we’re at right now,” he says, back at the site of the proposed wind farm.

Wyoming’s strategy for protecting the greater sage grouse has brought some wind projects to a standstill. But for now, this site - the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre - has been spared. Both the state and developers say they’ve found a delicate compromise that makes room for renewable energy and protects the sage grouse.

But for Miller, nothing is ever final.

“The sage grouse hasn’t gone away, we still have the bird,” he says.

And the bird could still be put on the Endangered Species List, a move that would no doubt put even more land off-limits - not just in Wyoming, but across much of the wind-rich Rocky Mountain West.

Molly Messick reporting for KUNC and Wyoming Public Radio.

Editor’s note: This piece first aired on KUNC in Colorado as part of the station’s ongoing series on roadblocks to clean energy in the West. You can listen to the report here.

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