Your Governor will not always be doing things which are going to be liked by you. That wasn’t the case this week though as the Governor made a proposal in front of the state of legislature which made a lot of people quite happy. There were actually 4 proposals and all of them were dealing with the tremendous growth of wind energy in the state of Wyoming. A part of these proposals was a tax to be imposed on wind energy at the rate of $3 per MWh. This is similar to the severance tax that various oil and gas companies need to pay. This tax would not really be assessed right until the wind company actually started to produce energy quite similar to the gas companies who only start paying for natural gas after they put it into pipelines.

On the excise tax of $3, Governor Freudenthal wishes for 60% to be given to the state itself and the remaining 40% to be given to the various counties that are affected due to this wind energy production. There are people though who believe that this isn’t fair and a larger share should be given to counties or atleast half. The counties & municipalities where wind energy is produced are the places which are most severely affected and they should thus be given the largest rewards. Roads, streets, water & sewer lines and social services inside the towns & counties are tremendously impacted while wind farms are being constructed.

The legislature now has to understand more ways in which they can change the system with regard to the Industrial Siting Act before private companies are able to construct more wind farms. The reason for this is that this act does not say anything about drilling & exploration and these are the areas from where most of the damage caused to communities comes and whats more, they do not even get anything out of it. There are outcries from various wind developers already and they claim to remove Wyoming from the wind energy map. But since, winds there are have an average speed of 11-20 mph, the developers should very soon be more than glad to be paying a little money as a fee for using this power to generate electricity. Wyoming indeed is the center for energy in this country. It has gas, coal and now wind. It would really be nice for that constant wind whcih everyone hates to finally be put to good use.