Fight Over $500 Million Rail Tie Wind Farm In Southern Wyoming Far From Over

TIE SIDING — The Rail Tie wind project has been a thorn of contention in southern Wyoming for years that’s now evolved into a legal battle royale.

The legal fight to kill off the controversial wind farm project in Wyoming’s southeastern Albany County may be one of the fiercest being waged over an alternative form of electricity production in the state.

Deep-pocketed donors who live in the 4,300-acre Fish Creek Ranch Preserve near Tie Siding have kicked in money to pay the legal bills to halt the Rail Tie project, a disputed $500 million wind farm investment proposed by a Spanish energy giant.

Otterbox founder Curt Richardson, who owns a cattle ranch near Tie Siding, and others have shown interest in the litigation.

There are other big-name donors from the preserve who have contributed to the litigation war chest to fight Rail Tie.

There’s John Davis, a retired certified public accountant and lawyer from an Indianapolis water utility who built his dream cabin less than a mile from the border of Colorado in the foothills above the Laramie Plains.

He climbed out of his Polaris Ranger and yelled through the open door of his neighbor’s home to see if friend Jim Grant could poke his head out during Cowboy State Daily’s visit to the region this week.

Silence.

Grant, a famous author who writes his thriller Jack Reacher novels under the pen name Lee Child, didn’t answer. Only painters were around.

Andrew Grant, Jim’s younger brother, is in the process of taking over the writing of the Jack Reacher series. Andrew and his novelist wife Tasha Alexander also have a home on the preserve and are supportive of efforts to fight Rail Tie.

Alexander writes historical mystery fiction novels and gained notoriety for her Lady Emily series.

“If you need to borrow a cup of Chivas Regal, you can come next door,” said Davis of his neighbors in the preserve.

Walking along Grant’s front porch that overlooks the Laramie Plains, the 345-volt Ault-Craig transmission lines can be spotted on the horizon several miles in the distance.

The lines represent a cash register for their owner, the Western Area Power Administration (WAPA).

WAPA is a Western United States power marketing administration with the U.S. Department of Energy that markets hydroelectric power from federal dams operated by the Bureau of Reclamation and other agencies. It’s what Rail Tie's owners want to connect their wind farm project into.

Grant’s home is about 6 miles south of U.S. Highway 287 in southeastern Albany County near where Spanish energy firm Repsol wants to start building concrete footings next spring for more than 100 wind turbines for the 504-megawatt development.

The bumpy path along Cherokee Park Road to the Fish Creek Ranch Preserve where Davis and his notable neighbors live is difficult to navigate with herds of pronghorn that can sometimes wander onto the road that traverses across the sagebrush landscape of the arid highlands at an elevation of 8,000 feet.

It’s another mile or two along cratered and dusty roads climbing through forests of evergreens and sagebrush growing alongside each other to reach the nearly two-decade-old rustic cabin that 72-year-old Davis and his wife, Susie built when they started to think about retiring.

Dude Ranch Period

They traveled all over the Western United States staying at dude ranches with their two kids when they were younger, but most liked the vibe of southeastern Albany County for their retirement years.

“Our kids really loved it,” John Davis said.

Dude ranches are where city dwellers from the East come to vacation. It’s where suburban people can taste Western life in the wide open, like riding a horse or see how a cowboy ropes a head of cattle.

“Our kids got to college-age, and we couldn’t get away together for summers. That ended our dude ranch days,” Davis said.

In the early 2000s, they bought undeveloped land in Tie Siding to build their own dude ranch.

The Davis’ daughter and son are grown and have kids of their own who make a point to visit a few months each summer.

The Davis homestead is decorated in a Western theme.

Davis had a contractor dig a mine in the hillside of their backyard for kids to play in, and even tossed some shiny rings and coins into an adjacent pit to give them some treasure to find.

Fourth Of July

Sometimes Davis and his wife recline on their cushioned couches in front of their living room’s toasty fireplace under blankets on chilly evenings and look out over the Laramie Plains.

Lightning storms provide a Fourth of July-like celebration as they look through an oversized picture window with panes that cover the entire northern side of their cabin overlooking the valley below.

“A deer once came up to the window and looked in,” Davis said.

Growing on the northern flank of their property are Ponderosa pines, lodgepole pines, spruce and white-bark Aspens.

The couple live in the Fish Creek Ranch Preserve, where there’s no hunting. It’s become a haven for wildlife of all sorts.

They’ve spotted black bear, moose, mountain lions and porcupine on Boulder Ridge behind their cabin. They sometimes fish for brook trout in beaver ponds on the land.

Their rescued beagles Tillie and Ginger guard the Davis family from the wildlife that sometimes traipse onto the land.

On the plains below is a migratory route for pronghorn and mule deer.

But it’s the WAPA transmission line that they’re most concerned about —not the wildlife.

The line is what brought energy companies knocking on their door.

First it was Shell WindEnergy Inc. that proposed the wind project on the Laramie Plains, then Houston-based ConnectGen took it over, and now Repsol.

The couple said that Shell WindEnergy started the “industrialization” of the valley below their home shortly after the couple bought their undeveloped 35-acre plot in the preserve in 2005.

Shell got its first toehold in the region with a small wind farm project 40 miles northwest of Laramie and had plans to build 200 wind turbines below the Davis’ home.

But a decade ago, Shell abruptly abandoned what was then called the Hermosa West project after concluding that it was in the best interests of shareholders, according to a WAPA announcement in May 2014.

The Protests Begin

“We remonstrated against it,” said Davis of the joint efforts of all three energy companies to build Rail Tie over the past 20 years.

The Davis family came to the valley at a time of land development in the hills to the south of Tie Siding.

They knew others who moved into the Fish Creek Ranch Preserve at around the same time in the early 2000s, but most of those friends left during the migration of people out of big cities during the COVID-19 pandemic when workplaces were locked down.

“We used to gather at our house with our neighbors to watch the Indianapolis 500 on Memorial Day,” Davis recalled.

Those days are distant memories.

The migrants from Los Angeles to New York City came to the Tie Siding exit off U.S. 287 to find their “COVID sanctuaries” because they thought real estate prices were heavily discounted in comparison to the urban jungles that they were escaping from, said John Davis.

In the foothills of the preserve, he points out historical markers to the area’s past and the 9,665-foot Diamond Peak that they can easily see in Colorado on the back porch of their Elk Crossing Road cabin.

Diamond Peak has a scandalous history.

It was the scene of a diamond swindle known as the Diamond Hoax of 1872.

That’s where a pair of prospectors tricked prominent businessmen from San Francisco and New York City to buy worthless claims for diamonds. A diamond prospecting craze was briefly triggered.

The preserve is littered with 19th century cabins and a sawmill that crumbled long ago. A rotted elk carcass lies in one collapsed cabin.

A makeshift burial ground with the cremated remains of loved ones in the area have been spread on place locals call “Wish Mountain,” where stone benches give visitors a moment to reflect.

No Don Quixotes Here

Davis doesn’t feel he’s a Don Quixote-type who is tilting at windmills in some mission to save the solitude of his way of life.

He just wants the wind farm owners to follow the rules and regulations and properly file for permits to build their wind farm with “financial adequacy” statements. He doesn’t want them to walk away from their projects should they run out of money.

Davis also wants Repsol to rethink how the wind farm development might destroy the viewscape and disrupt archaeological and historical markers in this remote area of the Laramie Plains.

“They’d be as tall as Devils Tower,” said Susie Davis, noting that the nearly 600-foot-tall wind turbines proposed by Repsol would fall just a few hundred feet short of the top of the national monument in the northeastern corner of Wyoming.

“When we chose to build here, we never planned on this,” she said.

Legal Battles

The legal battle to halt the Repsol project is far from over.

Earlier this month, the Wyoming Industrial Siting Council, made up of appointees within Wyoming’s Department of Environmental Quality, voted 5-0 in a special meeting to reaffirm their endorsement of Repsol’s financial plans to build its energy project.

The Industrial Siting Council is a regulatory body that oversees where utility-sized projects get built in Wyoming.

The goal of the July 10 special meeting by the council was to review whether it had acted properly in giving Repsol permission to build.

The council spent a considerable amount of time behind closed doors reviewing its Dec. 4, 2023, order to give the project a green light. The review and vote July 10 was a necessary and critical step needed before construction could begin.

The homeowners who live in the Fish Creek Ranch Preserve said proper steps weren’t followed. The council’s vote isn’t the final say.

In a Wyoming district court in Laramie, the opponents of Rail Tie successfully sought an order stopping construction from beginning because of their arguments that Repsol and predecessor ConnectGen had missed filing deadlines for proper financial adequacy statements.

The court must still rule on this matter.

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

The process became complicated when 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, which owned ConnectGen, officially closed on the deal to sell its wind portfolio with the Rail Tie project in March.

Construction on the 504-megawatt project that covers more than 26,000 acres of the Laramie Prairie on the northern and southern sides of U.S. Highway 287 had been set to begin this fall.

But the schedule has slipped at least six months, and costs are expected to rise in line with an 18% inflation rate over original costs penciled out years ago, Caton Fenz, CEO of Repsol’s Renewable North American business, told Cowboy State Daily earlier this month.

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

Still, through it all, the Davises have no plans to move.

“We lost the original group of people who used to live here,” John Davis said. “We aren’t selling because of stubbornness, but maybe because we are an obstreperous group of curmudgeons.”

Contact Pat Maio at pat@cowboystatedaily.com

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