A massive wind turbine rises into the air about 60 yards from where I stand. Silhouetted against an endless blue sky, the structure is taller than the Statue of Liberty, and the tips of its three blades spin more than 150 miles per hour, fast enough to complete one revolution every four seconds or so. Looking up at it from the ground is disorienting; I feel as if I've shrunk. Even the Ford F-250 pickup I'm about to climb into—one of those monsters with a roaring engine and an extra bar to help you step up into the cab—seems miniature. I listen, but if the turbine itself is making a hum or whir, I can't hear it over the relentless pounding of the wind, a white noise accompanied by the sound of the air snapping against the loose fabric of my jacket.

Opposite me, on the driver's side of the pickup, is Laine Anderson, director of wind operations at PacifiCorp, a public utility company that powers more than 140,000 square miles across six Western states. As I move to hop in the truck, Anderson cautions me to watch my door. He's never actually seen one blow off a vehicle, but PacifiCorp does cover the possibility in safety training.

See more from The Climate Issue | April 2020. Subscribe to WIRED. Illustration: Alvaro Dominguez

The wind farm we're touring today is called Glenrock, one of nine that PacifiCorp operates in Wyoming; they are among the more ideally situated wind farms in the US. Wyoming's topography—a series of mountain ranges and plateaus spread diagonally across the state—creates a sort of natural funnel. In some towns near the end of that funnel, the gusts are so strong and persistent that trees noticeably lean to the east. In fact, the wind blows harder and with more regularity here in south-central Wyoming than just about anywhere else in the US. And yet compared to Texas, Iowa, California, and several areas across the Great Plains, Wyoming lags far behind in wind development, ranking 16th for installed wind capacity. Glenrock stands in a state where renewable energy has been, if not quite embattled, then stigmatized and viewed with contempt. And the reason for this cold reception is, in a way, written on the landscape of Glenrock itself.

Anderson shifts the truck into gear and starts up a hill. Up high, you get a better sense of the wind farm's scope: 158 steel turbines that look like pinwheels copied and pasted into neat rows across 14,000 acres. You also get a sense of its backstory. Constructed in 2008, Glenrock was the first wind farm in the country to be built on top of a reclaimed coal mine—a feat of modern engineering that doubles as a particularly on-the-nose metaphor for the transformation that Wyoming has been reluctant to embrace. “Right here on our left, this was an open pit,” Anderson says, pointing to a rolling field.