At the Wyoming Capitol, ranchers and CFACT press for a cumulative review of the wind wall

CHEYENNE, Wyoming — A coalition of ranchers, conservation advocates, and free-market groups gathered at the Wyoming State Capitol at noon on June 4 to ask a single question that the state’s permitting process is not built to answer: what happens to golden eagles, private property, and the open range when dozens of separate industrial wind projects are added up across a corridor that runs more than 100 miles?

The rally, billed as “Save the Eagles, Stop Wind,” was hosted by CFACT alongside Conservatives of USA, Loos Tales, the Albany County Conservancy, and The Kim Monson Show, which co-sponsored the event and broadcast from Cheyenne that morning. Speakers included sixth-generation farmer and rancher Trent Loos, Cheyenne Realtor Wendy Volk, and Craig Rucker, co-founder and president of CFACT. Their shared demand was a full landscape-level cumulative review, a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, before the next wave of turbines is approved.

A registered letter and a hand-drawn map

For Volk, who married into a fifth-generation Horse Creek ranching family, the fight started about a year ago with a registered letter. It came from Repsol, the Spanish energy company, announcing a 56,000-acre wind project on unincorporated land north of Cheyenne, in the Horse Creek area. Volk said the map attached to the letter looked like “a postage size stamp” and did not show that her family’s ranch bordered the project on two sides. When she pressed for a clearer map, she said, the company first sent the wrong one.

That sent Volk into a roughly 500-page application, into traffic studies for Horse Creek Road, and into the question of how 200-foot blades would move down a state highway with no shoulder past the 15-mile mark. After a public hearing that ran more than four hours, the Laramie County Board of Commissioners denied the Laramie Range Wind Project, which Cowboy State Daily reported called for up to 170 turbines, on September 16, 2025, in a 3-1 vote. The fight did not end there. Repsol affiliate ConnectGen later cut the plan to 139 turbines on 42,000 acres and filed a petition for review in district court; Volk has said the revised footprint is still twice the size of Cheyenne.

As neighbors from Platte, Carbon, Converse, Albany, and Goshen counties started calling her about their own wind, solar, and battery proposals, Volk printed a state map and began marking the projects on it. The pattern, she said on the show, resolved into a single picture she calls the Wyoming wind wall. CFACT now describes that wall as a corridor of nearly continuous proposed development running some 200 miles across southeast Wyoming.

One project at a time

Volk’s central point is procedural. “That’s what our permit process is, is to look at an individual project, not a landscape corridor review of these projects,” she said. The federal framework works the same way. Golden eagles are protected under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and the Lacey Act, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service may authorize the “incidental take” of eagles at wind projects under that first law. Under a 2024 rule, those authorizations are issued project by project. No single permit weighs what a continuous 100-mile wall of turbines would do to a migratory bird that does not recognize a property line.

Rucker put the same problem in terms of whales. Reviewers ask one offshore wind project at a time how many North Atlantic right whales it would kill, he argued, and each answer sounds tolerable in isolation. “If you did a cumulative analysis, you could wipe out a whale species,” he said, noting the right whale population is critically small. NOAA Fisheries lists the North Atlantic right whale as endangered and is running an ongoing federal mortality investigation, and attributes the species’ decline mainly to fishing-gear entanglement and vessel strikes. His point is one of arithmetic: regulators sign off on the deaths one project and one state at a time, and never add them up into a single total for the whole buildout.

Wyoming’s eagles

Wyoming hosts the largest golden eagle breeding population in the lower 48 states and provides habitat for many of the birds that winter and migrate through from Alaska and Canada. CFACT cites Teton Raptor Center conservation director Bryan Bedrosian for a decline of nearly a third in Wyoming’s golden eagles over the past 20 years, a window that overlaps the build-out of industrial wind. On air, Rucker described the same trend as a drop from roughly 4,000 nesting pairs to about 2,800. Nationally, the Fish and Wildlife Service describes the golden eagle population as at best stable at around 30,000 birds, which is part of why the advocates frame their concern as a Wyoming-specific one rather than a national count.

Golden eagles are not currently listed under the Endangered Species Act. CFACT wants that to change for Wyoming’s birds. The group is petitioning to have the Wyoming population listed as threatened, the lower of the act’s two tiers, which Rucker called possibly the only way to force the cumulative review the coalition is after. He described the turbine corridor as an ecological death trap: when a bird is killed near a turbine, another moves into the open territory and is killed in turn.

Who pays when the blades come down

The coalition also worries about the end of a turbine’s life. Volk pointed to Texas, where the state attorney general has sued a recycling company over a stockpile of more than 3,000 abandoned wind turbine blades dumped at unpermitted sites near Sweetwater. The recycler had promised to process the blades and instead left them stacked behind a fence before going out of business. “We found there’s right now in Texas, there were 3,000 blades abandoned,” Volk said. Her concern is that a decommissioning bill could land on Wyoming landowners and taxpayers if a developer fails. The Kim Monson Newsroom examined the Sweetwater blades and the question of who pays in a companion report.

The rally’s organizers frame their demand as a matter of process. They want the state and federal agencies to look at the whole corridor at once, count the combined toll on eagles and the range, and put a number on the decommissioning risk before nearly 1,000 more turbines go up. The Repsol project’s petition for review is still pending, more proposals are moving through county offices, and the question of how to weigh them together is now in front of lawmakers.