Crook County commissioners joked about the lack of a crowd Wednesday as they prepared to vote on the final permit for the Labelle Prairie solar project.
Quentin Rogers, vice president of strategic development for the project's developer, Powder River Energy, attended on behalf of the cooperative to answer questions from the board. Chairman Fred Devish had only one.
“Is it done yet?”
Commission Vice-Chair Bob Latham told Cowboy State Daily he can’t recall another local energy project going as smoothly as this one.
“A lot of people in this county are against solar and wind,” Latham said. “Powder River Energy knew they were going to be up against that, so they did this properly and got out in front of people.”
No community members spoke for or against the project Wednesday.
As the meeting wrapped with a unanimous approval from the commission, Devish cracked one last joke to Rogers — asking if he’d really come all the way to the meeting for a five-minute vote.
$1 Million In Savings
The LaBelle Prairie Project will sit on Powder River Energy land north of Interstate 90 near Exit 153 in Moorcroft, right beside an existing substation and line shop.
It pairs a 5-megawatt battery system built to discharge for four hours with a 1.2-megawatt solar array of roughly 2,100 panels spread over three to four acres.
The batteries will let the co-op store power when it’s cheap and tap it when demand and prices spike, giving Powder River Energy a backup supply of its own for the first time.
Once the project is finished, the batteries are expected to cut the co-op’s power purchases during peak times and save an estimated $1 million a year, which the co-op says will help keep costs down for its members.
Still, Latham said the easy vote to get the project across the finish line was a far cry from how the community felt at the beginning.
“When it first came out we did have a lot of people calling us and griping about the solar aspect of it,” Latham said. “As commissioners, we were the first ones people were calling. I told them, ‘Guys, I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.'”
Latham said he wrote down a list of all the questions and concerns he fielded from constituents and brought them all to a one-on-one meeting with Powder River Energy CEO Brian Mills.
Latham said Mills took the time to answer every specific concern with a well-reasoned response, proving to him the value of dealing with a power company rooted in the community.
“They’ve put a lot of thought and time and effort into this,” Latham said. “And they all live here. It’s not like this is some big corporation and they all live in New York or LA. They all live here, so they’ve got to deal with this also.”
That openness extended to the community, with the cooperative conducting several town halls and community meetings during the planning stages.
Latham said trust came easily because he and other Crook County residents have seen the cooperative’s service hold up.
Since he bought his house in 2019, he said, only one or two outages have lasted longer than 10 minutes, and even after major events that took a day or two to fully restore, crews worked the problem right away instead of putting it off.
“A cooperative run properly with the right people is awesome,” Latham said. “They’re here for the members so they wouldn’t be doing this project if there wasn’t a benefit for the members.”
‘Main Street Not Wall Street’
Powder River Energy is a member-owned, not-for-profit electric cooperative, which means the more than 12,000 people it serves are also its owners. Those members elect a 10-person board, with two directors from each of the five northeast Wyoming counties the co-op covers.
Tim Velder, the cooperative’s spokesman, said what Latham described demonstrates the motto of Powder River Energy.
"We're concerned about Main Street, not Wall Street,” Velder said. “We're not owned by a large investment fund or anything like that. We are basically owned by our own members, and that's who we're obligated to serve.”
That obligation meant taking seriously the worries about solar that Latham described, Velder told Cowboy State Daily, and the co-op heard plenty of them as the project took shape.
“Once we explained that the solar panels would be just a small portion of an overall battery storage technology that we would want to bring to the service territory, people were a little less nervous about it,” Velder said.
As a member of the county’s volunteer fire department, Latham said fire was his biggest worry because battery fires would pose a big problem for a small crew. The cooperative had planned for that too, Velder said.
“We also do trainings with the fire department as far as how to respond to the unlikely possibility that there might be an emergency out there of some kind,” Velder said.
‘Turning Of The Dirt’
The $23.5 million project is financed through a U.S. Department of Agriculture loan, with 20% of it eligible for forgiveness. Together with federal tax credits, that is expected to leave the co-op covering about half the cost.
“We do have to come up with some funding on our end,” Velder said. “But we're estimating that that would be paid back with the savings.”
Velder said the Wednesday vote was a “big day” for the project, as it has now cleared permitting and can start breaking ground.
“The actual turning of the dirt can begin hopefully before the end of the year,” Velder said.
Already, Powder River Energy is planning to have next year’s annual membership meeting at the project site.
“We're going to give tours of the facility,” Velder said. “It won't probably be completed just yet, but it'll give people the opportunity to walk through it, touch it, see what it is up close.”
Emma Jane Jackson can be reached at emma@cowboystatedaily.com.
