America needs a new environmentalism

WINTER IS windy season in Wyoming. On a particularly gusty day, those brave enough to travel on the I-80 highway will find that their fingers curl in a death grip around the steering wheel as winds buffet the car. The side of the road becomes a graveyard for lorries that have been blown over. Yet the same terrifying gusts make Carbon County, of all places, an ideal site for a wind farm. PacifiCorp, the biggest utility in the American West and a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway’s energy arm, operates a suite of wind farms in the county. Philip Anschutz, a billionaire who made his fortune from fossil fuels, wants to turn his Wyoming ranch into a sea of turbines.

Wyoming (population: 580,000) cannot possibly use all of the energy it can produce. In order to meet President Joe Biden’s goal of decarbonising the economy by 2050, America needs to move energy from the windiest and sunniest places to those with the most demand. That means using the megawatts generated by Wyoming’s winds to charge a Tesla in Los Angeles. But a bureaucratic thicket stands in the way. Both PacifiCorp and Mr Anschutz have spent more than a decade trying to get high-voltage transmission lines that cross multiple states approved. TransWest Express, Anschutz Corporation’s proposed line from Wyoming to the Nevada-California border, has yet to break ground.