Controversial $500M Wind Farm Gets Go-Ahead After Heated Closed-Door Meeting

LARAMIE — There was lots of tough talk behind closed doors about the future of a controversial $500 million wind farm investment by a Spanish energy giant Wednesday as state energy regulators and activists clashed over more turbines in Albany County.

But most of these strong words for the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality regulatory body that oversees where utility-sized projects get built on sagebrush and dusty landscapes in Wyoming were outside public review.

The meeting took place in executive session in a Laramie convention center where DEQ regulators heard from activists who had access to confidential financial information on the backers of the wind farm project but were compelled into silence on pain of financial or stiffer penalties.

The agenda for the meeting was set in motion because of a complicated legal mess that has unfolded in recent months, putting the activists in an awkward position with the public.

After meeting behind closed doors for most of four hours Wednesday, the DEQ’s Industrial Siting Council ruled in a unanimous 5-0 vote that Spanish company Repsol could move forward with the controversial Rail Tie wind farm development.

Delays And Setbacks

Construction on more than 100 wind turbines for the 504-megawatt project had been set to begin this fall.

However, the schedule is expected to slip about six months because of legal in-fighting with opponents of the project.

The cost of the project is likely to rise in line with an 18% inflation rate seen as compared to when the project was originally penciled out years ago, said Caton Fenz, CEO of Repsol’s Renewable North American business.

“We are pleased with the decision by the council today,” Fenz said.

Fenz told Cowboy State Daily that Repsol plans to submit an amendment to its permit to build the project before the end of September that outlines the new costs and revised construction dates.

“Hopefully, we’ll have it in operation in 2026,” he said.

The Rail Tie project represents a chunk of nearly 20,000 megawatts of wind power in various stages of development for Repsol across the United States, Fenz said.

As first disclosed in Cowboy State Daily on Tuesday, the company also has plans to build a 500- to 600-megawatt wind farm in northwest Laramie County.

Fenz declined to say whether the company plans wind farm projects in Wyoming.

Repsol already has a portfolio of 720 megawatts of wind-producing turbines that are operating in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas.

Not Happy

While the Spanish company is pleased to go ahead with Rail Tie, longtime opponents of the project who live nearby in Albany County aren’t.

Behind closed doors, the movers and shakers who opposed the Rail Tie wind farm project were said to go toe-to-toe with the Industrial Siting Council over whether the new owners of the development have the financial muscle to pull off the project.

Roughly a few dozen of these opponents signed affidavits as part of a legal process to keep them from discussing the project publicly. The affidavits landed in their laps in recent months as part of litigation to stop Rail Tie’s construction.

Specifically, the confidential nature of these talks grew out of litigation that the opponents filed several months ago after the Industrial Siting Council apparently didn’t meet deadlines for compliance with financial adequacy statements filed by Repsol and the previous owner.

The change in ownership of Rail Tie led to Wednesday’s closed-door meeting at the University of Wyoming Conference Center in Laramie.

While the company developing Rail Tie is formally called Repsol Renewables North America, the project was previously owned by renewable energy firm ConnectGen.

However, Houston-based ConnectGen was sold by private equity firm Quantum Capital Group to Repsol in a $768 million deal initially announced last fall.

Quantum’s renewable energy arm, 547 Energy, owned ConnectGen, which was officially sold to Repsol in March.

Deep Pockets

“We have the resources to be compliant with the regulations to build and decommission and reclaim the project,” said Fenz, at the hearing. “Should additional resources be required, we also have access to the strength of Repsol.”

Some of the influential opponents who argued against moving forward with Rail Tie included Alan Minier, former chairman of the Wyoming Public Service Commission from 2008 to 2017 and State Board of Equalization from 2003 to 2008; and Kenneth Lay, former treasurer of The World Bank, where he helped manage more than $100 billion in investments.

“There has not been an adequate showing of financial resources,” said Lay in opposition to the Rail Tie project. “I know someone earlier remarked that Repsol is a major public company. It used to be. It has a low investment grade credit rating by major credit rating agencies.”

He questioned the recourse that a North American affiliate like Repsol Renewables might have to the resources of a Spanish corporate parent.

“I think it’s very important that these matters be fully evaluated,” said Lay, who testified at the meeting via video.

“As a group, we’ve got to think over our next options,” Minier told Cowboy State Daily.

“I’m not happy,” added Minier, who has a second home near the Rail Tie project off Boulder Ridge Road, where he lives during parts of the year.

“The financial conditions were not met,” said Minier, who argued in a brief open portion of the meeting Wednesday that previous owner ConnectGen was paid out for its investment when the Rail Tie project was sold to Repsol.

Troubled Waters

“I don’t know about you, but from the very beginning, the first thing I heard about this project was all the tax revenues that it was going to provide,” said Minier, who suggested that ConnetGen may have pulled back on investing in the Rail Tie project just as it was selling out to Repsol.

“It troubles me about the ease of which the entities that were involved in this before the sale, in particular, were able to change their names and shuffle their affairs and never be registered to do business in the state of Wyoming, all without apparently you knowing it, or me knowing,” he said. “The expiration of the permit is the right result. This permit should not be allowed to go forward.”

The permit process should be restarted with Repsol forced to file new financial filings disclosing its capital investment commitments going forward, he said.

“What’s going to happen is Repsol Renewables is going to come back to you in a couple of years and say, ‘You know what? We’re really a solar company, and we’ve decided we may have a couple of big wind energy projects we don’t want, and this is one of them, and we sold it to somebody else,’” he said.

Jodi Shea, an attorney with the Laramie law firm of Pence and Macmillan, who represents the Fish Creek Preserve homeowners outside of Laramie, expressed concerns about these kinds of projects given that they require “significant amounts of money.”

“If they failed, the fallout would be significant to the folks who live around this,” Shea said.

Homeowners in the Fish Creek Preserve area oppose the project because it brings down the value of the association’s properties and dispoils the viewscape of the area. They also have raised concerns over the impact on wildlife, archeological and historical sites.

‘Ray Charles Could See’

As background, the special meeting Wednesday relates to a Dec. 4, 2023, order by the Industrial Siting Council that approved the Rail Tie wind project, a necessary and critical step needed before construction could begin.

But the homeowners successfully sought a stay of the project from beginning construction because of litigation filed over missed deadlines and failure by the developers to file financial adequacy statements properly.

The homeowners claimed that state regulators approved the financial adequacy of the previous owner by not sharing the financial resource information with their group, which is an intervenor in litigation against the DEQ.

“I think Ray Charles could see that was inadequate,” said homeowner John Davis.

Contact Pat Maio at pat@cowboystatedaily.com

Pat Maio can be reached at pat@cowboystatedaily.com.