Legal Mess Ties Up $500 Million Wyoming Wind Farm Project

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Legal Mess Ties Up $500 Million Wyoming Wind Farm Project
An influential seven-member industrial siting group in Wyoming plans an early July meeting to sort out a legal mess that could determine the future of the $500 million Rail Tie wind farm development in Albany County.

Pat Maio
June 24, 2024
4 min read


(Cowboy State Daily Staff)

An influential seven-member industrial siting group in Wyoming plans an early July meeting to sort out a legal mess that could determine the future of the $500 million Rail Tie wind farm development in Albany County. ... The industrial siting group will likely head into a closed-door executive session July 10 to determine the “financial adequacy” of the former owner of the wind farm project and whether it was done legally by a Nov. 1 deadline, as well as whether the deep pockets of the new owner from Spain are sufficient to get the project built, according to sources involved in the meeting interviewed by Cowboy State Daily.

The cornerstone of the special meeting is to review financial adequacy statements of the wind farm development’s sponsors, according to an announcement issued by the Department of Environmental Quality’s Industrial Siting Council, which is tasked with the job of examining new energy projects in Wyoming. ... Dusty Spomer, chairman of the Siting Council, could not comment on the matter at press time.

The 504-megawatt Rail Tie project, which is located to the southeast of Laramie, is expected to benefit Albany County by generating $130 million in new tax revenues, according to figures provided by the new owner of the project to Cowboy State Daily.

The dust-up over the future of Rail Tie is the result of the Fish Creek Preserve Homeowners Association, which had filed a lawsuit to halt the development. The group claims that the bureaucratic mess on whether to build the project has been upended because of the Industrial Siting Council’s missteps. ... “They don’t know what they are doing,” said John Davis, a homeowner in the Fish Creek Preserve area and a retired accountant and lawyer involved in the lawsuit to halt the wind farm development.

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Pat Maio can be reached at [e-mail].