Tierra Energy LLC announced today that it has secured a contract to build a $55 million wind farm that will supply a Wyoming power company with renewable energy. Austin-based Tierra Energy's subsidiary, Happy Jack Windpower, will provide Cheyenne Light Fuel & Power with wind-generated energy over a 20-year period. Cheyenne Light Fuel & Power is a subsidiary of Rapid City, S.D.-based Black Hills Corp. (NYSE:BKH).

A quiet land rush is under way among the buttes of southeastern Wyoming, and it is changing the local rancher culture. The whipping winds cursed by descendants of the original homesteaders now have real value for out-of-state developers who dream of wind farms or of selling the rights to bigger companies. But as developers descend upon the area, drawing comparisons to the oil patch "land men" in the movie "There Will Be Blood," the ranchers of Albany, Converse and Platte Counties are rewriting the old script.

Wyoming needs a statewide strategy. So far in Wyoming, companies have proposed and developed "wind projects" by leasing private land and/or using company-owned land to erect towers, he said. While these wind farms are generating electricity, they're also generating conflicts about the proximity of towers -- and transmission lines -- to landowners, and a seeming helter-skelter approach to energy development, Meyer said.

About 200 concerned citizens flocked to Douglas May 7 for the first meeting of the Northern Laramie Range Alliance, an organization of landowners and citizens bent on stopping the development of wind turbines and the construction of a segment of Rocky Mountain Power's proposed Gateway West Transmission Line in the northern Laramie Mountains. "The main objective of the (Northern Laramie Range Alliance) is that we want to successfully oppose both of these things," Kenneth Lay, one of the alliance's founding members, explained.

Power Company of Wyoming, an affiliate of Denver-based Anschutz Corp., wants to build 1,000 wind turbines ...The influx of wind developers has raised hopes for jobs and economic development, but has also prompted concerns about erecting hundreds of 230-foot-tall turbines on largely undeveloped land. Locals and land managers, many of them veterans of the decade-long gas boom that brought a frenzy of development to Wyoming, point to the wind boom's potential downsides for wildlife, landscape vistas and local infrastructure.

The Anschutz Corporation, through an affiliate Transwest Express LLC, has acquired the rights to develop a proposed $3 billion, 900-mile, 3,000 megawatt high-voltage transmission line to bring electricity from wind farms in southern Wyoming to growing markets of southern California, Las Vegas and Phoenix. ...Another Anschutz affiliate, Power Company of Wyoming, LCC, already has started work developing a 2,000 megawatt wind farm project in Carbon County Wyoming.

The Power Company of Wyoming is moving forward with plans to build a 1,000-turbine wind farm that overlaps with areas identified by the state as critical sage grouse habitat, the company's president said. More than half of the company's Chokecherry and Sierra Madre project is proposed for land identified by the state as "core population area" in Carbon County.

In an effort to slow the winds of change, the Converse County Planning and Zoning Commission voted Oct. 20 to recommend that the county commissioners consider a 90-day county-wide "freeze" on all large scale industrial development. "From my personal perspective, this says that we want to do business, but we want to do business in a very logical and orderly fashion," said P&Z member David Pellatz. "It's a very different message in my mind. We're not talking bans. We're not talking never can do it."

The $3 billion, 900-mile-long, high-voltage line would provide for 3,000 megawatts of wind energy generation in Wyoming for delivery to emerging renewable energy markets in the Desert Southwest, according to Anschutz affiliate TransWest Express LLC. The announcement comes just weeks after another affiliate of Anschutz, Power Company of Wyoming LLC, filed notice to the Bureau of Land Management of its intention to install some 2,000 megawatts of wind generation in Carbon County. The permitting process for both projects could exceed two years.

The state board of Land Commissioners on Friday voted to withdraw from wind energy development about 1 million acres of state land within the core sage grouse population areas. The board action will not affect wind leases issued earlier within the core areas, said Lynne Boomgaarden, director of the Office of State Lands and Investments. The state office has received 32 special-use leasing applications for wind energy development, including 18 within an identified core sage grouse population area, she said.

GILLETTE -- Wyoming officials watched with interest as California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Wednesday signed into law a sweeping global warming initiative that imposes the nation's first cap on greenhouse gas emissions. When the idea for such a bill was recommended about a year ago, Wyoming energy officials reacted strongly against it -- and even sent a letter to Schwarzenegger's office suggesting it may violate interstate commerce laws. Called for reaction on Wednesday, Gov. Dave Freudenthal's energy adviser, Rob Hurless, said he wasn't prepared to discuss interstate commerce concerns, but said the California law definitely is not a threat to Wyoming's ambitions to export more electricity.

More than two decades have passed since the Bureau of Land Managment last updated its master plan to address how to work with approximately 1.4-million acres of BLM-administered public land surface and 4.7-million acres of federal mineral estate at overseen by the Casper office. The office now has a new plan to guide it through the next several years. ...Completely new is policy guidance on wind energy development, he said something that wasn’t even mentioned in the 1985 document. “We also have a much greater emphasis on protections for sage grouse,” said Meyer n a statement that conservationists dispute.

Homes and businesses in Wyoming’s capital could be powered partly by the area’s infamous wind by late 2008. Cheyenne’s electrical utility Tuesday announced plans for a 30 megawatt wind farm near the city landfill. Construction on the project could begin in 2007, and production could start by fall 2008, according to a news release from Cheyenne Light, Fuel and Power. Tierra Energy of Austin, Texas, won a contract to erect 14 turbines next to the city’s Happy Jack landfill. Cheyenne Light has agreed to buy 30 megawatts of power from Tierra for the next 20 years.

The Uinta County Commissioners voted unanimously to deny two conditional use permits that would have allowed an additional 120 wind turbines on Bridger Butte. Bridger Butte Wind Power and Bridger Butte Wind Power II, being run by Tasco Engineering, wanted to add the turbines in the general area of Bigelow Road, and extending southward from the current project.

A newly proposed wind power project in southern Wyoming would be one of the biggest in the world, and would more than triple the current number of utility-sized wind turbines in the Cowboy State. The proposal involves two adjacent wind farms in Carbon County that would be erected -- with a total of 1,000 turbines producing 2,000 megawatts of electricity, said Bruce Collins, spokesman for the Bureau of Land Management's Rawlins office. The two farms, taken together, would be one of the largest wind power projects on the planet, surpassing the Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center in Taylor County, Texas, which has 421 turbines and a production capacity of 735 megawatts, according to Florida Power and Light, the owner of the Texas wind farm.

A company plans to build a $420 million wind farm with 133 turbines in southwest Campbell County. San Ramon, Calif.-based Third Planet Windpower is eyeing 14,000 acres for the project on both sides of Wyoming Highway 50 near the Johnson County line. The company has begun talking to local landowners about leasing land.

A Texas-based wind energy company is making plans for the construction of a new wind farm in eastern Carbon County. Project manager Nate Sandvig of Horizon Wind Energy presented plans for the project this week to the Carbon County Commission and the Carbon County Planning Commission. ...The new wind farm would be located in the Simpson Ridge area south of Medicine Bow, near PacifiCorp's Arlington wind farm. Energy produced at the site would be shipped to California and other parts of the Pacific Coast, Sandvig said.

Mounting opposition from private landowners has prompted federal regulators to take an additional five to six months in the analysis of the Gateway West Transmission Line Project. The proposed high-voltage transmission line would span 1,150 miles from Glenrock to Melba, Idaho.

The Wyoming Infrastructure Authority is tracking seven major electrical transmission proposals at a combined cost of $15 billion, potentially adding 15,000 megawatts of new electrical generating capacity in and around the state. It's the shared ambition of Wyoming, which wants the economic benefits of exporting power, and Western states that want additional megawatts to come from cleaner forms of energy.

The Albany County Commission approved in its first meeting of the month on Tuesday part of a wind farm that will straddle the Albany County-Carbon County line. The commissioners approved a permit for 28 1.5-megawatt wind turbines for the North Rim Wind Energy Conversion System, which will be owned and operated by AES Wind Generation ...In addition to the permit for 28 turbines in Albany County, AES plans to install nine turbines on the Carbon County portion of the project for a total generating capacity of 55.5 megawatts of electricity.