Wyoming may not be top of your list of United States of America and may conjure up images of the Wild West, Cowboys and Indians and Mid-West rednecks. But it has an impressive record as being progressive and far-sighted. Take the vote for women. Which State granted that? Washington? New York? Nope. Wyoming. In 1869. A few years later, it created the first US National Park at Yellowstone.
And on October 9 of this year, a deal was struck whereby Wyoming will become the future home to what could end up becoming the biggest wind power farm the world has ever seen. The US Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar gave the approval for the construction of a proposed wind farm, to be located in a 350 square mile area, in (the inappropriately named!) Carbon County, Wyoming. It’s called the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project. It seems that, unlike the infamous film starring Humphrey Bogart, there will be real Treasure of the Sierra Madre to be found in the form of wind energy; the state has the richest wind resource in the US.
The proposal for construction of the wind farm was submitted in 2008 by Power Company of Wyoming LLC and will include 1,000 wind turbines capable of generating enough electricity to power approximately 1 million homes. Once constructed and fully operational, the wind farm will have the capacity to generate between up to 3 GW (gigawatts) of electricity- and so likely to be the biggest single wind farm in the world.
It’s estimated that construction of the wind farm will create as many as 1,000 jobs over the period of construction. The construction will be spread over three years with 300 to 400 wind turbines being erected each year. Upon construction and commissioning, there will be 114 permanent jobs created for general operations and maintenance. Here’s the area where it will be constructed:
The approval of the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project marks the completion of a goal set by the Obama administration in 2009 to authorize 10,000 MW of renewable energy on public land.
Salazar spoke of the Project;
“Wyoming has some of the best wind energy resources in the world and there’s no doubt that this project has the potential to be a landmark example for the nation. President Obama challenged us in his State of the Union address to authorize 10,000 megawatts of renewable energy on our public lands by the end of the year – enough to meet the needs of more than 3 million homes – and today we are making good on that promise.”
The next step is for the Bureau of Land Management to begin environmental analysis for the construction of the proposed wind farms, a 230-kilovolt transmission line, a rail distribution facility, substations for connection to the electric grid and the laying of the roads- all necessary to make it all happen. The first wind turbines will be erected in 2014.
