Wyoming Winds of Change Blowing

As Time Goes By

Out here on the western frontier, where the deer and the antelope roam there remain 33 coal fueled electric power stations. Wyoming is top mess maker, operating a dozen of these dirty devils. Toss in bait of federal tax subsidies, add lobby shops sprinkling magic money dust and Wyoming can’t put the demon coal habit down even though it takes 700 lbs. of coal to power a 100-watt lightbulb for one year.

Coal burning power stations employs people. A good paying job in Wyoming is a miracle unto itself. Hard to imagine now, but in 1886 Wyoming was the first state in the union to give women the right to vote. There was no choice. Had they not counted the women there were not enough voting men to qualify the state for entry into the United States.

Modern day Wyoming voters have shifted to the right, hard right, to the radical right. Half of Wyoming’s land is owned by “we the people,” a much smaller fraction by the state, and right on schedule the mining, livestock and timber industry all remain discontent by the restraints regulation places on their activities.

Butting Heads Against the Hard Rock

Outdoorsmen flock to Wyoming for hunting and fishing. Real estate around Jackson Hole is sky high. If you can find happiness in Casper, some do most of the rest struggle, somewhere $200,000 will get you a decent home. Wages for labor are lower than they ought to be. Libertarians pass through their resentments of governance blaming distant bureaucrats for all that ails folks here. Gas, oil and coal subsidies, federal tax dollars, inbound to Wyoming somehow escape libertarian criticism.

Wind power is coming on strong. Measured by megawatts the wind has some distance to go to catch up with coal. Nevertheless Wyoming has a lot of wind, it is renewable, you don’t have to dig it out of the ground, put it on a train, unload the rock onto a conveyor belt, burn it, shoot much of out a smokestack, then find you have no cheap or easy means of getting rid of the coal ash that remains a biohazard to the citizens for decades. You try to bury it one place or another, you go bankrupt trying, while all that free clean abundant wind keeps blowing free and easy past higher priced fossil fuel by leaps and bounds.

Politically even if coal, gas and oil are losing the fight against renewables for producing the cleanest, cheapest energy money can buy it still is causing economic disruptions that all of us will need to address. January 6 th, 2021 matters in this calculation. Coal plants are going to be shut down, wind and solar facilities are going to be opened. The largest coal power plants employ 100’s of people that are going to lose jobs. This is steady work at a good pay rate. Coal provides a community with economic stability.

Emptiness- My Beautiful Reward

Bigger financial institutions are the most frequent players in the funding of generating stations. There is good reason. A bank can plug numbers into a spread sheet, this many megawatts, produced night and day, twenty-four-seven, year in and year out, ratepayers with almost no other choice than to take what they can get, works out on paper in the banking business to be as sure thing as a money-making proposition can be.

Ramping up drilling in the Powder River Basin, 5000 leases have just been fast tracked, fire hosed and blessed by Texas tea black bullion barons, billions of dollars in federal subsidies, regulatory agencies sitting on their hands, a whole lot of down on their luck drillers are lining up for a piece of the action.

This isn’t champagne, caviar or wing nuts over Yellowstone. This is not a free market economy. This is crony capitalism, regulatory capture, where the favors are doled out to the most favored.

Private equity, Wall Street, the “too big to fail banks” are all becoming reluctant players. Investment dollars are getting harder to come by because the price of renewable energy is down, and that cleaner cheaper thing is, if you didn’t know it, a better thing.

There are fewer Democrats in Wyoming than there are grizzly bears. Republicans in Cheyenne like playing hard ball, deregulate industry, say not one word about federal fossil fuel subsidies, cut the state budget, then cut taxes more, then cut them again, trigger fiscal crisis, then snarl and bark about how government doesn’t work.

Wyoming Coal Southbound to Pueblo, Colorado

What we can do is end the federal fossil fuel subsidies that keep going to Cheyenne. Switch federal tax incentives to the low-cost leader in energy, that would be solar and wind, launch a reality based economic transition program. Help Wyoming’s workers first, the fossil fuel companies second. Then, start a dialogue with the state’s politicians. Wyoming is windy. A redesigned electric power grid is needed, those are all good paying jobs.

Coal is not coming back. Nuclear power is way too expensive. By 2025 the best Ford pickup money can buy will be electric. Miners in Wyoming will be repurposed. National security will require domestic sources of lithium, copper, and manganese be developed.

I’m not kidding, it’s going to be good

We will need leadership in Wyoming to sit down at the negotiating table. Republicans need to look to the energy future. Modernizing our energy system, setting our nations table, setting a course for a cleaner, more efficient, cheaper, world class competitive electric energy supply will pay our people back many times over. World class infrastructure means providing America with the chance to remain a world class economic powerhouse. I’m good with some progressive policies mixed in with conservative ideas too. What we need is a bipartisan agreement to follow the facts wherever they may lead us. Renewables are cheaper and not helping the citizens make it through the energy transition is unaffordable. We can’t squander our most precious natural renewable resource, our people, for the sake of ideology, because we slam the brakes on last century’s oil economy. We all make a decision together, that we all agree that we can’t leave our citizens behind. If this was poker, done right the energy transition is a winning hand. Better times and brighter less expensive lighting is just ahead.

Originally published at http://danasmith.com on January 18, 2021.