The solar industry may love Wyoming’s lax business rules and wide-open spaces, but those come with another hazard the Cowboy State’s famous for.
It’s called hail.
Catastrophic hailstorms haven’t been kind to solar developers, as evidenced by events tracked by a major insurer of solar farms. At the same time, Wyoming’s sweet spot for solar development also is across a swath of the southeast part of the state known as Hail Alley.
Since a catastrophic hailstorm in Texas in 2019, premiums that solar farm owners have paid to insure their investments have soared by triple-digits.
At the same time, claims filed with insurers to recover replacement costs have fallen short.
James Papazis, director of operations and legal counsel at London-based renewable energy insurance company GCube Underwriting Ltd., told Cowboy State Daily that more discussions are taking place in advance at the up-front stage of financing projects before solar farm construction even begins.
The market is being driven by higher claims because of catastrophic hail damage.
Today, most claims surpass $100 million, with that payout not near enough to cover the total cost of hail-damaged equipment, Papazis said.
“The industry needs to make better use of available weather data to understand and support mitigation and underwriting risks,” he said.
As a warning, some developers may want to consider Nebraska farmer Dan Fitts’ story before building a solar farm.
Farmer’s Warning
Fitts ended up a few miles southwest of Yoder, Wyoming, a little over a week ago chasing down a hailstorm, something he’s done since he was old enough to climb behind the wheel of a car.
When he first jumped into his 2016 F-150 pickup on June 20, his 11-year-old son Colby excitedly told his father that he wanted to see a “baseball-sized” hailstone.
After all, Colby had been begging to tag along for a few years and never got the green light to crawl into the truck’s cab with his father.
Well, Colby got the surprise of his life on his very first trip.
By the time Fitts parked his truck 4 miles southwest of Yoder, the hail was pounding the pavement, and a funnel and rope tornado had already stirred up in the distance.
He quickly steered the truck into the 60-70 mph gusting winds to take the beating of the “huge” hailstones already smacking his Nascar Lexan-approved windshield.
Such windshields, which he installed in his truck for hailstorm chasing, are not glass, but a type of plastic like windows in an airplane. They are lighter and tougher to break than glass to withstand crashes by Nascar race car drivers.
“I got into the hail core,” boasted Fitts, who lives in Melbeta, Nebraska, where he farms dry beans, corn and sugar beets on 1,500 irrigated acres, though he lost half of his crop to the June 20 storm.
Hail Capital
“This is the hail capital of the world,” he said. “I grew up here and I’ve always been intrigued by the hail, especially the big stuff, which is over 3-inches in size.”
Fitts slipped on his desert-green motorcycle helmet, opened the door and quickly grabbed a chunk of the ice, and slipped back into the truck to measure the stone with his caliper.
“The first big stones started falling, and I grabbed one that measured 3.9 inches,” he said. “On that day, the wind was blowing really hard, and I got some that were 5-inchers. They are fairly rare.”
He tossed the hailstone into an RV freezer in the bed of his truck to preserve proof of the story. It’s something he started years ago to show his son.
“With those stones hitting solar panels, especially with the way the wind was blowing that day, they’d just destroy the solar panels,” he said. “Period.”
The bullseye of Hail Alley in Wyoming covers a very large land mass.
Like clockwork, it arrives in late May and ends in early September.
The havoc it wreaks can be extensive.
Where Is Hail Alley?
In Wyoming, the western edge of Hail Alley begins around Vedauwoo just west of Laramie and extends eastward along the Laramie Mountains to Cheyenne and the rest of southeastern Wyoming, said Cowboy State Daily meteorologist Don Day.
The area runs up about 130 miles to a northern edge along Interstate 25 to Douglas, and 60 miles eastward to Lusk near the border with Nebraska.
“That’s kind of the epicenter. That area has the largest hail and most frequent hail,” Day said.
But hail knows no state boundaries.
Hail Alley extends out of state to Scottsbluff and western Nebraska, northeastern Colorado and the northwestern corner of Kansas.
“Hail happens everywhere, but the frequency of hail is highest in those areas,” Day said.
Hailstorms in the region is attributed to warm, moist air moving up from the Gulf of Mexico, which collides with dry air moving from desert-like climates in Arizona and Nevada.
“Wyoming’s topography and geography makes it a very favorable location and environment for large hail formation,” Day said.
Hail events can average up to a dozen any given season, with hailstones ranging in size from pebbles to the size of softballs.
Solar developers in Wyoming are aware of the hail issue, but still they come.
Dealing With Hail
There are three solar projects in various stages of development in Wyoming’s Hail Alley. They are proposed for the Yoder area, where Fitts parked his truck, Douglas and south Cheyenne.
Cowboy Energy LLC, which is run by Sheridan businessman Paul Stroud and his partner Hezy Ram, who are geothermal and alternative energy experts, teamed up with Portugal-based Greenvolt Power to build a $155 million solar farm in Goshen County.
Goshen County’s board of commissioners approved the project, but is tinkering with the regulations and may want to revisit Cowboy Energy’s plans.
Cowboy Energy plans to build nearly 326,000 solar panels spread over 1,200 acres situated about 15 miles southwest of Yoder, about an hour’s drive northeast of the state’s capital city, Cheyenne.
Stroud said his company has built what it believes is a hail-resistant solar farm.
The panels will be thicker with ceramic super coatings and have better construction overall than the hail-damaged panels seen past years in Nebraska and Texas, which were thinner.
Importantly, the Cowboy Energy and Greenvolt panels can be tipped over via computerized tracker controls to protect them from the battering on panel surfaces from oversized chunks of falling ice, Stroud explained.
Canadian energy firm Enbridge Inc. has proposed a $1.2 billion solar farm development in south Cheyenne, the state’s largest solar project. That project encountered delays with Laramie County officials over a dispute over who is to pay for a county-maintained road needed for the project.
The industrial siting council of Wyoming’s Department of Environmental Quality issued key permits to Enbridge on May 21 to move forward with the 1.2 million-panel farm project. However, the county’s planning commission and board of commissioners must still take up the proposal before Enbridge can begin construction. Snags
The 771-megawatt solar farm will be built on private land leases in two phases south of Cheyenne, about 4 miles southeast of the capital city. The solar power facility will generate enough electricity to light up more than 771,000 homes, more than in all of Wyoming.
Construction on Cowboy Solar 1 is expected to begin in March 2025, with commercial operation commencing in January 2027. Commercial operation of Cowboy Solar II is expected to begin in August 2027.
The next biggest solar project in Wyoming has been proposed by Florida-based BrightNight LLC, which wants to develop a 500-megawatt solar farm near Glenrock in a way to also graze sheep on the same land.
BrightNight’s $500 million project, called the Dutchman, is scheduled to begin construction in March 2025 and could start generating power to the electrical grid by late 2026.
“Every project requires unique design and engineering considerations based on many factors, one being location and weather,” explained a BrightNight spokeswoman in response to Cowboy State Daily questions about the project’s ability to withstand a hailstorm.
“As for hail, this is definitely something our industry is looking at carefully,” said BrightNight spokeswoman Maribeth Sawchuk. “We've seen a lot of panel manufacturers test ways they can make panels more durable.
She explained that one option to mitigate the risk of hail damage is to move the panels.
In this instance, the panels could be stood straight up on their sides so that hail would not directly strike their surface.
“This has been quite effective,” she said.
Additionally, panels today can be manufactured with varying levels of glass thickness that add to durability.
“We'll be considering manufacturers that offer this option,” she said. “Overall, it's important to note that the project will be insured, and its regular maintenance would immediately manage any damage.”
Wind and dust also may become a factor, but BrightNight has a plan to accommodate “high winds.”
“Our investigations show that dust is unlikely to prevent a reduction in energy production, and high winds can be monitored by our operations controls,” she said. “When high winds do occur, the panels can be placed in something called ‘stow mode.’”
Stow mode turns the panels so that they are essentially turned to face up and appear flat so that wind can pass safely over the infrastructure.
“Technology is rapidly changing. Both the panels and the tracking systems (which control the movement of the panels) have evolved to address the issues caused by hail,” Sawchuk said. “Projects installed today will benefit from those innovations and the lessons learned from other projects using older technology.”
More On The Way
A fourth solar farm was recently built on the western side of the South Greeley Highway near the intersection of Chalk Bluff Road.
In September, that 150-megawatt solar farm was bought by Atlanta-based Southern Co. from QCells USA Corp. The acquisition is the 30th solar project for Southern, but its first in Wyoming.
The project is scheduled to begin supplying electricity to Black Hills Energy soon.
A Southern spokesman could not immediately say what steps his utility has taken to protect its investment from hail damage.
GCube’s Papazis said that solar is a fast growing space and warned of potential pitfalls ahead.
"In the past 10 years, I have seen significant growth in the number of projects and in size of the projects,” he said.
As a growing space, he said that solar has become a competitive insurance market as new projects entered the market and total values continued to grow.
"As the number of projects grew and the project size grew, so did the losses,” he said.
Pat Maio can be reached at pat@cowboystatedaily.com.
