Sammy Roth

The Desert Sun

You wouldn't expect Philip Anschutz to build America's biggest wind farm.

Anschutz is one of the country's richest people, with an estimated net worth of $12 billion. He owns or holds major stakes in Regal Cinemas, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, among many other music festivals, sports franchises and event venues. He co-founded Major League Soccer, and he once bought and sold the Southern Pacific Railroad.

He's also a big player in conservative politics. He owns two influential right-leaning magazines, the Weekly Standard and the Washington Examiner, and he's given at least $1.8 million to help elect Republicans across the country over the last two years, according to campaign-finance records.

Anschutz owes his fortune to fossil fuels. He got his start in the oil and gas industry in the early 1960s, taking over his father's drilling company and eventually discovering a massive untapped oil field under a ranch he'd bought in Utah. He sold a stake in that oil field to Mobil Corporation for a reported $500 million, then used that money to launch his other business ventures.

These days, fossil fuels are a small piece of the Anschutz empire. In fact, there wasn't a drill rig in sight as Bill Miller, who oversees Anschutz's oil and gas business, maneuvered his Ford Raptor off-road truck through the rugged, snowy hills of Overland Trail Ranch in south-central Wyoming on a bitterly cold December morning. Clad in a cowboy hat befitting his long history as an oil and gas "land man," Miller explained that the 500-square-mile ranch is roughly the size of Los Angeles — and that it's home to some of the most powerful onshore winds in the continental United States.

Anschutz owns the ranch and raises cattle there. When Miller suggested 10 years ago that he build a wind farm and send the electricity to California, the conservative billionaire didn't hesitate.

"It’s just a natural resource," Miller said, when asked if it's awkward for a fossil fuel magnate like Anschutz to try his hand at renewable energy. "Raising a cow is a natural resource. Growing a commodity in a farmer’s field is a natural resource. And we’re a resource-based company."

A decade later, Miller is nailing down the final government permits for Chokecherry and Sierra Madre, which at 3,000 megawatts would be the country's largest wind project. He plans to build 1,000 turbines, each of them 262 feet high, along with a 730-mile power line to get the electricity to California. He needs to send the energy out of state because Wyoming doesn't have enough people to use it. California is ideal because of its huge population, and because it's trying to get half of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, part of a wide-ranging strategy to fight climate change.

For Anschutz, building a wind farm is a simple proposition. He thinks he can make money doing it.

But for conservative Wyoming politicians sympathetic to the state's struggling coal industry — and for California leaders who see Wyoming wind as a tantalizing resource — nothing is simple.

California Gov. Jerry Brown is pushing state lawmakers to approve a controversial plan to link California's electric grid with Warren Buffett's PacifiCorp utility, which serves five other western states. That could lead to California getting more wind power from Wyoming and sending more solar energy to its neighbors. But critics say Brown's six-state strategy could inadvertently lead to California losing control of its energy policies and propping up coal plants in Utah and Wyoming, polluting the climate in the process. California's Legislature is expected to take up the proposal this year.

In Wyoming, meanwhile, the economic importance of fossil fuels, and fury over the Obama administration's climate policies, threaten to derail the fledgling wind industry. Wyoming is already the only state in the country to tax wind energy, and some lawmakers are working to raise the tax. The Anschutz Corporation has fought a tax increase, warning it might not be able to build its project.

As Donald Trump takes office, California and the West face a series of decisions that will shape their energy and environmental futures, and their ability to take action against climate change. To understand those decisions, you have to start on a windswept ranch in rural Wyoming, with an oilman in a cowboy hat building his first renewable energy project for a conservative billionaire.

The North Platte River flows through Overland Trail Ranch, which ranges from 6,000 to 9,000 feet in elevation in Wyoming's Carbon County — so named for the coal that was once mined there.

Bill Miller was 59 years old when he first pitched Anschutz on building a wind farm at the ranch. As the longtime head of the Denver-based Anschutz Corporation's oil and gas business, Miller also oversaw the company's agribusiness, and he'd been trying to sell Overland Trail Ranch. But as he read more and more about growth opportunities in renewable energy, a light bulb went off.

"The Rockies are bigger to the south, they're bigger to the north, and this is just kind of the funnel through the Rockies for the west-to-east wind patterns," Miller said as he drove through thick snow up Miller Hill (not named for him), which has some of the ranch's strongest winds. A few minutes later, he would get out of the truck, and a powerful gust would knock his cowboy hat off.

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Now 69, Miller is still a few years away from seeing the first turbines go up at the ranch. He's amazed the environmental review process has taken this long. He tells a story about a Bureau of Land Management employee, back at the beginning, who looked him in the eye and told him, "This is going to take five years." Miller remembers thinking, "How the heck could this take five years?"

Looking back, Miller blames regulations stemming from the National Environmental Policy Act, which "have just grown and grown and grown, to the point where it's a regulatory nightmare," he said.

The ranch sits on a mix of private, state and federal lands. The federal land approval process has been the most difficult.

In January 2008, the Anschutz subsidiary developing the project applied for a right-of-way permit from the federal Bureau of Land Management. The agency began analyzing every manner of environmental impact, from bird deaths and ground-level habitat disruption to dust emissions during construction, disturbance of Native American artifacts and visual changes to the landscape.

The biggest obstacle, by far, was potential damage to the greater sage grouse, a chicken-like bird known for its colorful mating rituals, whose habitat stretches across 173 million acres in the West. Sage grouse populations have been declining for decades, and for several years the Obama administration was considering protecting the bird under the Endangered Species Act. That could have hamstrung oil and gas drilling, ranching and other economic activity, a possibility that sent some western states into a frenzy as they negotiated with federal officials to avoid that outcome.

The Interior Department ultimately chose not to list the sage grouse under the Endangered Species Act, striking a 10-state deal in 2015 to protect the bird's habitat while leaving room for development. But whatever decision the Obama administration might have made, Miller knew that concern over the fate of the greater sage grouse could sink his project.

So despite his frustrations with the environmental review, Miller made sage grouse protection a priority. He worked closely with the Audubon Society to identify critical habitat on the ranch, outfitting about 100 birds with expensive radio transmitters and hiring scientists to track their movements across the property. His team has done at least half a dozen major redesigns as a result, moving proposed turbine locations to avoid sensitive areas. Miller said the wind project will generate a lot less electricity as a result, since those sensitive areas have some of the strongest winds.

Even with a sage grouse plan in place, building the wind farm won't be easy. In a small trailer that serves as the project's on-site office, a map pinned to the wall shows the extensive restrictions that will be placed on construction. Colorful circles denote areas where the Anschutz subsidiary developing the project, the Power Company of Wyoming, won't be able to build during certain months, so as to protect sage grouse, raptors, eagles, elk, mule deer and pronghorn. Big stretches of the map are blank, showing areas where no turbines will be built.

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But those safeguards haven't fully satisfied conservationists.

Brian Rutledge, the Audubon Society's Central Flyway conservation strategy and policy adviser, praised the Anschutz team for its work to protect sage grouse and other birds, noting the company has also studied eagle flight patterns and moved turbines out of heavily trafficked routes. But while the developer has "really been at the forefront" of finding ways to limit bird deaths, Rutledge said he's still skeptical of current wind technology, since it's impossible to eliminate all impacts.

"We have a lot of other challenges for our bird life already, and we don't need to add to it in a way that is crippling," he said. "We need to go back to the drawing board a bit on the structure of a wind farm. There must be other ways of generating electricity with wind that aren't going to be in direct conflict with avian visitors."

The Anschutz Corporation has already spent about $100 million on the wind farm and power line, a staggering sum for two projects that still haven't reached construction — and a hint of just how much money Philip Anschutz hopes to make. When all is said and done, the company expects to spend $5 billion building the wind farm and $3 billion building the transmission line, Miller said.

President Barack Obama's Interior Department approved the wind farm in October 2012, nearly five years after the initial application. Federal officials spent the next few years conducting an environmental review of the developer's plan for where specifically the first 500 turbines will be built, finally signing off last month. (The Interior Department will review the second set of 500 turbines later.) Miller hopes the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre facility — which gets its name from some of the mountains that populate the ranch — will start generating electricity by 2020.

RELATED: Obama exaggerated growth of clean energy on federal lands

That timeline depends on Anschutz building the 730-mile TransWest Express power line, which would stretch from south-central Wyoming through Colorado, Utah and Nevada, eventually reaching the Eldorado Substation south of Las Vegas, near the California border. From there, Anschutz would be able to transmit electricity to possible buyers in California, Arizona and Nevada.

The Bureau of Land Management approved the federal-land portions of the route in December after an extensive environmental review, but that leaves nearly 250 miles that would run through state, private or tribal lands. Now that he knows the federally approved route, Miller will apply for state permits and contact some 450 private landowners his company has identified along the route.

Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead said other wind developers will look to the Anschutz project as a "large test case," studying the "incredible permitting process" before deciding whether to move forward.

"Anybody's who's producing wind, I think they'll see this project and how long it took, the money involved," Mead said in an interview. "Presumably the next one will be a little bit easier as they learn from this one."

Anschutz isn't the only developer who's seen renewable energy projects slowed by federal environmental reviews. Across the country, solar and wind firms have complained that federal land managers and wildlife officials are holding them to unreasonable standards, especially compared to fossil fuel projects, which have a far greater environmental impact.

In November, the Obama administration issued a new regulation that could either speed up or slow down clean energy development on federal lands, depending on who you ask. The Bureau of Land Management's "competitive leasing rule" requires the agency to designate solar and wind energy zones across the West and auction off the leasing rights to the highest bidders, rather than letting developers apply to build anywhere. The Interior Department says the rule will make the permitting process faster and easier for developers; solar and wind companies aren't so sure.

The leasing rule will also impact Anschutz's Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind farm. The project already has its main federal permit, but the new regulation will increase the developer's lease payments.

"It's going to increase our cost significantly," Miller said. "It was something where we thought we had certainty, but then we didn't."

As America's most populous state and the world's sixth-largest economy, California casts a shadow over the West, especially when it comes to energy. The state's ambitious climate programs have driven technological innovation and forced utilities to adapt to its clean-energy preferences. California wants more solar and wind power — a lot more — so that's the direction the West is moving in.

But California also has some of the country's highest electricity rates. Even some lawmakers who support renewable energy are wary about policies that could raise rates too much, too fast. Solar is now cheaper than natural gas across much of the state, but there are still costs in the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Utilities need to make sure the lights stay on when the sun goes down or the wind eases up, which often means building expensive, natural gas-fired "peaker" plants. Building solar farms in remote places can also necessitate costly new power lines.

That's why some officials, including Gov. Jerry Brown, see out-of-state wind as so attractive. California's best wind hot spots, including the San Gorgonio Pass in the Palm Springs area and the Altamont Pass east of the Bay Area, have been mostly built out for years. But some of the country's fastest and most consistent onshore winds blow untapped through Wyoming and eastern New Mexico. Energy and economic experts say California could save money by taking advantage of those resources, rather than its slower, less consistent and therefore costlier in-state winds.

RELATED: Why fighting climate change won't destroy the economy

The winds at Overland Trail Ranch average between 18 and 29 miles per hour, according to the Anschutz team. The winds of the San Gorgonio Pass, which power the iconic Palm Springs-area wind farms, average 15.8 miles per hour in areas with turbines, according to Chris Lucker, director of the Desert Wind Energy Association.

Miller knew early on Californians would be his ideal customers. The state is home to 39 million people — Wyoming's population is 585,000 — and California utilities are required by law to get half of their electricity from renewable sources by 2030. Last year, 27 percent of the state's electricity came from renewables, according to preliminary estimates from the California Energy Commission.

Chokecherry and Sierra Madre could help California make up the difference. The Anschutz Corporation estimates the project will generate 10.5 million megawatt-hours of electricity annually — nearly as much as the 12.2 million megawatt-hours California got from all in-state wind farms in 2015, according to energy commission data.

The Golden State's push for clean energy has been driven by a desire among voters and lawmakers to limit global warming, which virtually all climate scientists agree is primarily caused by human activity, especially the burning of coal, oil and gas. Brown has made climate change a legacy issue, working directly with national leaders around the world to limit emissions and attending the global climate summit in Paris in late 2015.

Though Miller is skeptical of the scientific consensus that humans are driving climate change, he's a pragmatist. He sees which way the country is moving, led by California.

"Rightly or wrongly, the policies they've advocated, the direction they go, does have a huge impact on the rest of this country," Miller said after leaving the ranch on that frigid December morning, over lunch at a burger joint in nearby Rawlins. "I find it a little amazing sometimes that they adopt and go forward with some of the policies that they do. But I don't live there. They’re my customers, I love every one of them."

RELATED: How climate change is already harming human health, the economy and national security

The Anschutz Corporation doesn't yet have a buyer for the electricity from its wind farm, but Miller is confident they'll have contracts before his team is ready to start construction. California utilities are the likeliest candidates, but Miller is casting a wide net; he said he's had "ongoing discussions with virtually every offtake partner that exists in the desert Southwest, and the West in general."

Assuming Miller can find a buyer, the last big obstacle facing Chokecherry and Sierra Madre might be political.

Wyoming lives and dies with fossil fuels: About 70 percent of the state's revenue comes from coal, oil and gas. Natural resources and mining accounted for 11 percent of nonagricultural, private-sector employment in 2015, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The vast majority of funding for school construction and maintenance comes from coal lease payments.

Coal's economic impact — and political power — is on display at the Jim Bridger power plant in southwestern Wyoming. The massive facility employs about 340 people, according to plant manager Rick Tripp, with another 400 jobs at the mine next door. The plumes of steam that rise from the coal plant can be seen many miles away on Interstate 80, obscuring an otherwise clear sky.

On a tour of the plant in December, one employee shared his view of the presidential election, commenting, “We got the man elected and not the woman, so we can keep our guns and our jobs.”

Wyoming's dependence on coal, oil and gas means some politicians are wary of energy sources they see as threatening to fossil fuels. It also means the state's economy is especially vulnerable to booms and busts. Right now, oil prices are down due to a global supply glut, which has reduced drilling in Wyoming and elsewhere. And the coal industry is hurting badly, largely because it's getting out-competed by cheap natural gas from other states. About 300 million tons of coal were mined in Wyoming last year — still the most of any state, but down from a high of 467 million tons in 2008.

Taken together, those trends have created a budget crunch for the state. And some lawmakers see the wind industry as a potential source of new revenue.

Wyoming is already the only state in the country to tax wind energy generation, to the tune of $1 per megawatt-hour, and now lawmakers are talking about raising the tax. The Legislature's Joint Revenue Committee defeated a proposal to raise the tax to $3 per megawatt-hour last year, after an aggressive lobbying campaign led by the Anschutz Corporation and supported by local leaders in Carbon County, who hope wind development will raise their struggling county's economic fortunes. They packed the revenue committee meeting in faraway Buffalo, giving hours of testimony.

"One of the things that the committee said — they were absolutely blown away with the amount of participation that came out of Carbon County to talk about how important this project was, how economically viable this project was, and how shortsighted we were being if we tax this out of existence at its infancy," Gary Conatser, then-president of the Carbon County Economic Development Corporation's board of directors, said at a development corporation meeting in Rawlins, the county seat, in December.

The battle isn't over: Last month, three lawmakers introduced a bill to raise the wind tax to $5 per megawatt-hour. The legislation was quickly defeated in the House Revenue Committee by a 7-2 vote, but there's still an appetite among some lawmakers to extract more money from the wind industry.

Miller wouldn't say outright that Chokecherry and Sierra Madre isn't getting built if the wind tax goes up. But he warned it's hard to know if the project will pencil out with a higher tax rate.

"The market dictates whether this project gets built or not," he said. "You start adding costs to the project — the people that are gonna build this project ultimately, and buy the power from this project, make that decision at that time."

That probably isn't an idle threat, according to Robert Godby, director of the Center for Energy Economics and Public Policy at the University of Wyoming. While Wyoming has some of the country's best onshore winds, Godby said, other states also have plenty of commercially viable wind — and not only do those states not tax wind power, they often incentivize it. Even the Anschutz Corporation, which has spent $100 million developing Chokecherry and Sierra Madre, won't keep throwing good money after bad if it decides the project is no longer viable, Godby said.

For Rep. Michael Madden, a member of Wyoming's House of Representatives and co-chair of the Legislature's Joint Revenue Committee, raising the wind tax is a matter of fairness. As part of an effort to drum up new revenue for the state, Madden commissioned a study last year which found that coal and natural gas pay taxes as high as $2.69 and $4.89 per megawatt-hour, respectively, compared to the $1 per megawatt-hour generation tax for wind.

"Wyoming has a pretty long history of making sure that we don’t pick favorites in the marketplace," Madden said over breakfast at the Plains Hotel in downtown Cheyenne in December, before a legislative meeting at the Wyoming state capitol down the street. "So we had a big joint revenue meeting where that was on the agenda. As you would expect, wind energy people don’t like to pay taxes. They like to take subsidies and they like to take production tax credits, but they don't like to pay taxes. So we were unsuccessful."

Madden, who has a Ph.D. in economics, doesn't think raising the wind tax would hinder development. Neither does Cale Case, a Wyoming state senator and also a Ph.D. economist. He and Madden were co-sponsors of the recent bill to raise the wind tax to $5 per megawatt-hour.

"We studied it, we felt the market could handle it," Case said, referring to the earlier $3-per-megawatt-hour proposal. "And I want to point out — the tax we put in was a fraction of what the study said the market could handle."

Godby isn't so sure. During a presentation at the Carbon County Economic Development Corporation meeting in December, he pointed out that Wyoming added more than 1,100 megawatts of wind power between 2005 and 2010 — third most among the 11 states on the western electric grid. But between 2010 and 2015, as wind boomed across the West, Wyoming was the only state not to add any new capacity. In fact, Wyoming lost some capacity, as project operators decided not to replace a few older turbines that had reached the end of their usable lives.

"The tax effect is really difficult to quantify because every developer is different. You don't know what all their alternatives are," Godby said in an interview at a coffee shop in Laramie, Wyoming, where the university is based. "But...it would be foolish to think there’s no effect."

Godby also criticized the Legislature's tax study, saying it left out several taxes paid by wind developers and didn't account for the fact that fossil fuel companies deplete a finite resource. The state-commissioned study also didn't examine wind's economic benefits. Godby conducted his own study, funded by the Wyoming Business Council and the Carbon County Economic Development Corporation, and found that five planned wind projects could generate $7.1 billion in new economic activity, $3 billion in labor income and $1.9 billion in tax revenue under current tax rates.

Tripling the wind tax, by comparison, would raise an additional $942 million for state and local coffers, Godby found — if all five projects are built as proposed despite the tax increase.

There's no question that loyalty to fossil fuels, and anger over what critics called the Obama administration's "war on coal," have helped fuel the push to raise the wind tax. Asked about the funding shortage for Wyoming schools, Madden blamed Obama for "choking off any new expansion of coal," calling the former president's signature climate initiative, the Clean Power Plan, "the worst mess I’ve ever seen in my life."

Some lawmakers have taken out their frustration on the wind industry. A bill pending in the Legislature would make it all but impossible for Wyoming utilities to serve in-state customers with electricity generated by large wind or solar farms — a symbolic restriction, since wind developers are focused on out-of-state markets anyway, but a sign of the animosity directed toward wind power.

Another factor: Many Wyoming lawmakers reject the overwhelming scientific evidence showing that global warming, primarily caused by human beings, has already begun and will only get worse. Asked about climate change, Madden said he's "pretty agnostic about it," before citing a widely believed myth that there was a scientific consensus around "global cooling" in the 1970s.

"The climate changes all the time, and in my lifetime we've watched climate change. But that doesn't mean it’s all caused by humans," he said. "I'm a statistician — we need to have a statistical link between carbon and heat. And that's one thing that in all my research that I've studied, there's no given link between carbon and heat." (There's a well-established link between carbon and heat.)

Case is the rare Republican lawmaker who accepts climate science: Asked about global warming, he cited an article he read the previous day about sea-level rise and acknowledged that "a big component is anthropogenic." He doesn't think coal has much of a future in Wyoming, even if the U.S. takes an "eight-year hiatus" from regulating carbon during the Trump administration, he said.

“There are people here that are just mad at wind because they feel that it's hurt coal," Case said. "That's kind of silly, but there are people that think that."

Case knows the reality is more complicated. While Obama's climate and clean air regulations have had some impact on the coal industry, energy experts say the major force driving coal companies to bankruptcy has been cheap natural gas, made available by the boom in hydraulic fracturing, a drilling technique. Natural gas also emits about half the planet-warming carbon emissions as coal when burned, giving utilities across the country big economic and environmental incentives to buy more gas-fired electricity and less coal-fired electricity.

But for coal companies and their political allies, Godby said, it's easier to blame Obama and push back against renewable energy than it is to acknowledge the role of natural gas.

"You really don’t want to pit coal against natural gas. It’s just a political minefield," Godby said. "Everybody can unite against something that’s against the general interest of fossil fuels. It's more difficult when you start splitting the tribes."

RELATED: Climate advocates say most fossil fuels must stay in ground

Loyalty to fossil fuels isn't the only reason some Wyoming lawmakers are skeptical of wind power.

Case has a heartfelt objection to wind turbines: He thinks they're ruining pristine views. For him, a big reason to raise the wind tax is "to compensate future generations for what they’re losing."

Case is an old-school conservative, who believes in small government and a separation between church and state. He endorsed then-Texas Rep. Ron Paul for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, and he voted against a 2011 bill that would have prevented Wyoming from recognizing gay marriages performed in other states.

"I like the idea of a green energy future. I really do," Case said. "While I’m grateful (Californians) are becoming more green, I think they need to think about the impacts of their consumption decisions on Wyoming's vistas."

Wyoming's energy politics have put Gov. Matt Mead, a Republican, in a tough spot. He wants to see more wind farms, knowing they'd bring economic benefits, and he's been hesitant to support a tax increase. But like many Republican lawmakers, he risks a backlash from his party's most conservative wing if he's seen as compromising on the GOP's opposition to Obama's climate regulations.

In 2014, Mead made a major energy speech that "broke the ice," in Godby's words. The governor reiterated that he personally is skeptical about climate science, but said markets believe in climate change, and Wyoming needs to react to the markets. He then convinced the Legislature to spend $15 million on an "integrated test center," where teams of scientists are studying ways to capture carbon from a coal-fired power plant and turn those emissions into valuable products. The nonprofit XPRIZE has promised $10 million to the team that develops the best process.

"Up to that point, it would have been really dangerous to fund carbon capture. Without accepting climate change, why are you spending state money?" Godby said. "Now the argument is we have to, because even if you don’t believe it, this is what's going to be necessary to save our coal."

Energy and economic experts say Trump won't be able to reverse the long-term shift away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy, partly because solar and wind will keep getting cheaper and partly because major economies like California, the European Union and China will continue to drive the global marketplace toward cleaner forms of energy. But even if Trump can't fulfill his campaign promise to revive the coal industry, his election has already emboldened coal advocates, who could push back even harder against renewable energy and existing regulations.

Trump could also try to make trouble for wind energy; during the campaign, he lashed out at wind technology again and again, calling the turbines in the Palm Springs area "the worst thing you've ever seen" and saying they make the city look like "a poor man's version of Disneyland." Still, clean energy advocates aren't especially worried, saying there's not much Trump could do to slow wind power's rapid growth. U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, has said he would block any effort to repeal the wind production tax credit, which is scheduled to expire in 2020.

"I think (President Trump's) positions are taken sometimes without a whole lot of insight into what really is happening," said Miller, the Anschutz Corporation executive in charge of the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind project. "But I don't fault him for that. He's also willing to listen. He seems to be quite willing to change a position when it's pointed out that maybe that is necessary."

RELATED: Trump's pick for EPA chief rejects climate science and fights for fossil fuels

At the end of the day, the energy policies Wyoming pursues will affect not only Wyoming, but California and the rest of the West. Decisions made in Cheyenne could determine the fate of America's largest wind farm and many smaller ones, as well as Jerry Brown's proposed expansion of the California electric grid to include Warren Buffett's PacifiCorp utility. The grid expansion would need to be approved not only by the California Legislature, but by public utilities commissions in the five other affected states: Idaho, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.

Miller thinks linking together the western grid is a good idea and will eventually happen, not only for renewable energy reasons but also to create a more reliable, cheaper grid. And while he realizes officials in Utah and Wyoming are worried about being subjected to California's climate policies — and he understands they need to "protect the coal business that they have" — he also thinks they need to accept what the future holds. Miller supports an "all of the above" energy strategy, but he thinks coal's days are numbered, even if Trump reverses Obama's Clean Power Plan.

"Deep down, I think I know that we're going down a path here that's probably not going to change significantly," he said. "Whatever decision the new administration makes, I don't know that it matters a hell of a lot."

READ PART TWO: Jerry Brown and Warren Buffett want to rewire the West

Sammy Roth writes about energy and the environment for The Desert Sun. He can be reached at sammy.roth@desertsun.com, (760) 778-4622 and @Sammy_Roth.

(Editor's note: Travel to Wyoming and Sacramento for this series was funded by the Society of Environmental Journalists, through its Fund for Environmental Journalism.)