CHEYENNE -- The Wyoming Office of State Lands and Investments has drawn up rules for wind development leasing on state land, partly to help reduce potential conflicts between wind development and other uses such as mining, drilling and ranching.
The office is charged with managing about 3.6 million acres of state trust land for beneficiaries including public schools. The office is taking written comment on its proposed rules until Monday and plans public hearings in mid-March in Casper, Green River, Rawlins and Cheyenne.
Butch Parks, commercial property manager in the office, said the department's existing rules were written with mineral leasing and other industries in mind, not wind. But the new rules wouldn't change much for wind lease applicants because they reflect how the office has been managing such leases in recent years.
"We've got 100 years of experience in the mineral industry. The policies and everything have been pretty well refined," Parks said. "Here we're really wanting to spell out what we're doing and have these rules support what we're doing."
Wyoming has 23 wind lease agreements on about 47,000 acres of state land. Five of those have operational wind farms, totaling 86 turbines that produce about 92 megawatts, Parks said.
The office is also soliciting wind energy lease proposals at 16 locations covering about 160,000 acres. The state Board of Land Commissioners authorized the leasing this month.
The office identified the lands in Laramie, Platte, Goshen, Niobrara, Converse and Carbon counties because of their good wind resources and minimal conflicts with environmental concerns or other uses.
"The idea is it's an opportunity for increasing our revenues, but the second thing is it targets the locations that might minimize the conflicts," Parks said.
The state's proposed new rules for wind leasing would specify that wind rights cannot be severed from the surface estate.
The rules require that developers notify existing lessees, including surface and subsurface interests, of their application for a lease to develop wind on the same state lands, and seek written consent from those lessees.
The proposed rules require surface impact payments to existing surface leaseholders who could suffer negative effects like disruption to grazing. The rules also set an installation fee to be paid to the state. Parks said that payment usually works out to between $3,000 and $3,500 per megawatt.
Karyn Coppinger, senior development manager for Invenergy and chairman of the Wyoming Power Producers Coalition, said most of the proposals shouldn't cause problems for developers because they've already been working under similar requirements from the state office.
Developers work with grazing leaseholders and screen lands for their mineral potential to try to avoid conflicts with mineral development, she said. Developers generally evaluate state lands the same as other land: based on its wind resource.
"It just depends on the wind and how the state lands fit into the overall mosaic of the privately leased lands or the federal lands," she said.
