Page 90 - Forbes - USA (October 2019)
P. 90
BIG WIND which turned out to be in Wyoming in the vicin-
ity of the Overland Trail Ranch. Here, through
ON A WYOMING RANCH BIGGER THAN SAN FRANCISCO, ANSCHUTZ’S the mountain gap that pioneers on the Overland
WIND COMPANY IS BUILDING 1,000 TURBINES THAT WILL BE ALMOST
Trail took on their way west, came big, steady
500 FEET HIGH AND POWER 1.8 MILLION HOMES.
winds, averaging around 20 mph.
Anschutz and Miller sketched plans for a wind
farm with at least 1,400 turbines, figuring per-
mitting would take about four years and they’d
86 Berkeley have it built by 2015.
Sausalito
Not so fast. The Bureau of Land Management
required a voluminous Environmental Impact
Z
T Oakland Study. There were negotiations with the Audubon
U
H Alameda Society and the Wyoming Game & Fish Depart-
C ment over how much land to set aside for sage
S
N grouse. The Oregon-California Trails Association
A
wanted access to the wagon tracks still etched into
L Daly City
I the landscape. And the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
H
P OVERLAND TRAIL RANCH was worried about how many endangered golden
500 SQUARE MILES
E eagles the turbines were likely to kill.
L
I Anschutz paid for vegetation surveys, employed
F
O ornithologists, deployed avian radar, mapped ea-
R
P San Mateo gle flights. He agreed to set aside the skies above
105,000 eagle-favored acres as off-limits to tur-
bines. Adjustments were made so that the “view-
Redwood City shed” from the Teton Reservoir would not be
marred by the flickering of turbine blades in the
distance. “We’d never seen a project of that scale
before,” says Brian Lovett, administrator of Wyo-
ming’s industrial siting division. “They were made
to jump through a lot of hoops.” Some sour grapes
of northern Wyoming. It wasn’t long before An- remain—historic preservationists hope that An-
schutz bought his father out. In 1967, a crew did schutz will someday allow tourists to walk on the
hit oil but lost control of the well, which ignited wagon ruts that cross his land.
into a raging inferno. Famous oil well firefighter It’s fun to do things other people think can’t
Red Adair requested $100,000 to battle the blaze, be done, Miller says, recalling the oil pipeline
and quick-thinking Anschutz saved his company that he and Anschutz built in the 1970s from Ba-
by getting Universal Pictures to pay that sum for kersfield, California, through Los Angeles to the
the filming rights. (The footage was used in the port of Long Beach. “People thought we were ab-
John Wayne flick Hellfighters.) solutely stupid, but we did it,” Miller says with
Anschutz made his first mega-fortune in 1982, a laugh. They got the same thrill risking $1 bil-
selling half of an oilfield on the Wyoming-Utah lion to lay thousands of miles of fiber optics with
border to Mobil Oil for $500 million ($1.4 bil- Qwest Communications in the 1990s. “You know
lion in today’s money). He reinvested in mining how many customers I had signed up? Zero,” An-
and railroads and built the Southern Pacific line, schutz says, holding up his fingers in an “o” sign.
which in 1996 he sold to Union Pacific for $5.4 “But I knew the world was moving from voice-by-
billion, valuing his shares in the new company at the-minute to data-by-the-megabyte.” He sees the
more than $900 million. same kind of bet in the transmission line that will
But wind was already on his mind. Anschutz carry wind power across four states, 16 BLM dis-
loved riding his railroad around California, and he tricts and the properties of 378 landowners.
marveled at the wind farms built in the Sierra Ne- America’s wind capacity will grow 60% in five
vada passes. “I started out just curious,” he says. “I years from a current 100,000 MW, according to
had come out of the traditional energy business and consultancy Wood Mackenzie. Those turbines
thought, what’s all this?” Wind turbines looked to have to go somewhere. If America is dedicated to
Anschutz like any other natural resource business— decarbonizing its energy sources, it makes sense
kind of like an upside-down oil well, sucking ener- to utilize the windiest places with the fewest peo- PATRICK WELSH FOR FORBES
gy out of the air. And one that would never run dry. ple. “The wind regime extends beyond our ranch
He asked Bill Miller, then president of his oil to the whole gathering basin,” Anschutz says. “If
company, to find the windiest land in the nation, we can’t build it here, we can’t build anywhere.” F
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