Power line link plan includes Boulder City

Especially in Wyoming, south of Rawlins.

That’s where most of the “best winds” are, according to the National Renewable Energy Lab Wind Research Center.

And that’s where a Denver company wants to build the nation’s largest wind farm and string a transmission line 725 miles to Boulder City. The company would build a substation in El Dorado Valley, south of town, to distribute enough Wyoming wind energy to power 1.8 million homes in Nevada, Arizona and California.

Boulder City was a natural terminus for the project, said TransWest Express spokeswoman Kara Choquette.

“There’s a whole lot of existing transmission lines in that area,” Choquette said. “There’s no need to build the line any farther and still reach the market.”

The company’s $500 million investment in a Boulder City substation would create another 200 construction jobs, she said.

TransWest Express hopes to begin building the “extra high voltage” — 600-kilovolt — transmission line across federal lands in 2013, pending environmental review. The line would tap power produced by 1,000 turbines. Construction of the wind farm — known as the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project — could begin as soon as next year.

That would put Carbon County, Wyo., at the heart of a plan to reduce the country’s carbon footprint. The county was named for an old Union Pacific Railroad coal camp, 140 years before the nation set an agenda to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels by investing in clean renewable energy.

“This output will help America reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, diversify energy sources and meet growing demand for renewable energy resources. At the same time the wind project will generate hundreds of good jobs, millions of dollars in tax revenue and other economic benefits,” according to the company’s website.

TransWest Express is an affiliate of The Anschutz Corp., a privately held company with a 75-year history of energy development. Anschutz has diversified to include ranching, real estate, transportation, communications, sports and entertainment.

Construction of the TransWest Express line alone will create up to 1,000 construction jobs during the three-year building phase in addition to up 5,000 indirect jobs nationwide to meet demands for materials and services, the company says.

The Bureau of Land Management is shaping the environmental review. It has held public meetings in Southern Nevada that drew dozens of interested parties and local government representatives who offered to help federal land managers develop an environmental impact statement for the proposed transmission route.

The public has until April 4 to submit comments to the BLM for shaping a draft impact statement to be released next year.

Sharon Knowlton, project manager for the Bureau of Land Management’s Wyoming State Office, said the goal of the project is to issue right-of-ways and easements to deliver wind power from remote areas of Wyoming to densely populated areas of the Southwest.

“There are completed wind farms already in Wyoming,” she said, noting that the Western Area Power Administration “is considering whether to join in the project.”

The shortest and preferred route by TransWest Express for the transmission line calls for 2-mile-wide corridors that basically follow existing above-ground utility routes. Once a route is selected, right-of-ways and easements would be narrowed to 250-foot-wide paths.

About 10 miles of the company’s preferred route in Clark County is located on private land but alternative routes could contain as much as 71 miles of private land in the county.

“If some of those alternatives are least impactive, it doesn’t mean all 71 miles would be chosen,” Knowlton said.

The shortest, 725-mile route for the transmission line would cross 15 counties in four states and pass through five national forests and lands managed by 17 BLM offices.

Contact reporter Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308.