For the past 20 years, Ryneal Medical Transport served West Virginians in the Eastern Panhandle when they were at their most vulnerable. 

If a Jefferson County resident was bed-ridden with end-stage liver disease, Ryneal could drive them to and from the hospital. If a Berkeley County senior citizen needed their oxygen tank managed on the way to a dialysis appointment, Ryneal could help.

“The first 15 years was great,” said Mary Helmick, Ryneal’s president and co-owner. “Actually, it was great up until COVID hit.”

That’s when staffing issues, paired with ride reimbursements that left little-to-no room for profits, began to cripple the organization, according to Helmick. She and her husband kept Ryneal alive for a while longer. But last January, they decided it was time to close, ending a service that in Helmick’s estimation would respond to 8,000 to 10,000 medical calls a year with their fleet of 24 specialized vehicles.

While there are a few other Eastern Panhandle organizations that provide the same types of services Ryneal did, none of them have the capacity to fully make up for the company’s absence. Many local health care workers understand why the organization shut its doors, but transporters and doctors alike say the change has made it even more difficult for some residents with life-threatening conditions to get to and from the hospital. 

“If there’s no Ryneal, they can’t safely leave the hospital because [staff] have no way to get them the continued care they need,” said Dr. Michael Londner, an emergency medicine physician and vice president of medical affairs at WVU Medicine Berkeley Medical Center. “They literally now are living in the hospital until we can sort out a solution.”

Problems related to health care transportation aren’t unique to the Eastern Panhandle; patients and providers have experienced problems accessing health care in other parts of West Virginia. 

But Ryneal’s closure highlights how West Virginians in the area rely on the medical transport system to get quick and effective health treatment — and how care suffers for all when one of those interdependent pieces goes away. 

“It’s its own ecosystem,” said Chad Winebrenner, the chief of operations for Berkeley County Emergency Ambulance Authority. “Even though we’re not directly tied in, that domino effect, it still gets to you.”

Needs unmet without Ryneal

There are many ways transportation issues can prevent patients from addressing their health needs. But in the Eastern Panhandle, Londner says the problem most exacerbated by Ryneal’s closure has been for patients who require special accommodations while in transit.

People who need this kind of trip range from those on dialysis who need stretchers to be transported to someone who needs oxygen administered on their way back from a chemotherapy session. It’s a population that requires either an ambulance or similarly-equipped vehicles to get from place to place.

Helmick remembers one of Ryneal’s last long trips, transporting a patient dying of cancer from Martinsburg to Emerald Isle, North Carolina, as one of these types of journeys. She said one of the woman’s dying wishes was to be at her home when she passed away. 

“We got her home at seven o’clock that night,” Helmick said. “She passed away at seven o’clock the next morning. We were very fortunate to get her home.”

In a post-Ryneal world, it’s becoming increasingly harder for Eastern Panhandle patients who need that kind of specialized medical transport to access it, even for trips that start and end within West Virginia’s borders. Londner said the region has struggled with these rides as long as he can remember, but the problem has expanded, first with an increased need from the COVID-19 pandemic and now with Ryneal’s closure.

There are other smaller companies in the area Ryneal served — primarily Berkeley, Jefferson and Morgan counties — that still offer specialized medical transportation services. The area’s two major hospital systems, Valley Health and WVU Medicine, each have a fleet of vehicles, as does a local private company called Patient Care Transport. 

But the region has seen large population growth over the past decade; it’s now home to over 200,000 people and has a higher-than-average disability prevalence. Even with the other service options, there is still a large unmet demand, according to Londner and Ali Hadavand, Patient Care Transport’s Chief Operating Officer. Hadavand said his company, plagued by the same staffing shortages felt by health care organizations across the country, is down to only three emergency medical technicians.

He thinks Patient Care could be shouldering more of the need left behind by Ryneal’s closure if it had more qualified employees.

“We’re doing our best,” Hadavand said. “I could definitely run two more trips a day at least.”

Now, the problem has become so severe that Berkeley Medical Center has held off from discharging some patients at all. Londner said that as of mid-June, one bed-bound patient who needs frequent dialysis treatments has been in the hospital for 158 days.

“He would need an ambulance three days a week to get him there,” Londner said. “And we don’t have any way to do that for him…We can’t safely discharge him knowing that he will not be able to receive care.”

The effects of this transportation gap are far-reaching. Emergency room wait times have risen for all patients, partly because hospitals can’t discharge people who are ready to either leave or be transferred but don’t have appropriate rides available, according to Winebrenner of the Berkeley County Emergency Ambulance Authority.

“It just becomes a pretty big backup when that chain gets broken,” he said. 

Mitigation possible with the right policies

Some of the factors that led to Ryneal’s closure, like health care workforce shortages, are problems that communities across the country struggle to address adequately. But others are issues that local policymakers could take steps to mitigate. 

In Ryneal’s January letter announcing its closure, Helmick and her husband cited low insurance reimbursement rates for rides as a major reason. While inflation raised the operational prices of goods like gas in recent years, the amount insurance providers like West Virginia’s Medicaid and Public Employee Insurance Agency paid Ryneal and other medical transport companies for their work didn’t keep pace. 

“This year it was going to hit harder,” she said.

While Ryneal may no longer exist, Londner thinks the only way future private companies can operate and succeed in the area is for insurance groups to raise their medical transportation reimbursement rates. It’s something he believes to be crucial for West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle and, as it pertains to PEIA and Medicaid, something in West Virginia lawmakers’ power to address. 

“You need the reimbursement to be higher so that people can afford to make a living being a transport company,” he said.

It’s also not just private transportation. Despite some legislative action during the 2023 session, local emergency medical service agencies are also struggling with funding and retaining staff members. Some West Virginians have said making sure state lawmakers support these programs financially is crucial to creating robust local medical transportation systems.

To address staffing issues, Hadavand of Patient Care believes it’s important for local policy makers to think about ways to get kids interested in becoming paramedics and EMTs. Some parts of the country have EMS programs that engage kids in middle and high school, offering early exposure to the professions.

While programs like that may not completely reverse health care workforce shortages, Hadavand sees sparking a medical transportation interest in young people as important for his industry.

“I’m not sure how to do it,” he said. “But I think that would help, having more kids wanting to go down this path.”  

‘Domino effect’: Eastern Panhandle residents struggle to get vital health care after closure of a medical transport company appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight, West Virginia’s civic newsroom.

An estimated 2.4 million people work on farms in the United States. Though their work is critical to agriculture and the economy alike, pesticide exposure continues to be a major occupational risk—and the effects ripple out into society and the food we eat.

Pesticides can easily drift onto farmworkers—and the schools and neighborhoods near fields. Current pesticide regulations aren’t consistently enforced, and vulnerable workers aren’t always able to seek help when there are violations. 

Exposures may continue around the clock, especially on farms where workers and their families live, says Olivia Guarna, lead author of a recent report, “Exposed and at Risk: Opportunities to Strengthen Enforcement of Pesticide Regulations for Farmworker Safety,” by the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law and Graduate School, in partnership with the nonprofit advocacy group Farmworker Justice. This is one of a series of reports addressing needed policy reforms and federal oversight of programs impacting farmworkers. 

Alongside faculty and staff in the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems, Guarna, a honors summer intern with a background in environmental issues, spent 10 weeks interviewing attorneys, officials, administrators, legal advisors, and farmworker advocates, researching how pesticide use is regulated and enforced in Washington, California, Illinois, and Florida. What Guarna didn’t expect was just how complicated the regulatory scheme is. The federal Environmental Protection Agency technically has oversight over pesticide use, yet in practice receives little data from states, whose enforcement is spotty at best. “There are a lot more protections on paper than I think are actually being implemented to protect farmworkers,” she says.

One of the biggest issues, according to Laurie Beyranevand, Director of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems and one of the authors of the report, is that unlike other environmental laws administered by the EPA, the agency doesn’t adequately gather data from the states, making enforcement of existing standards more difficult. 

In Florida, the report found, inspections are virtually never a surprise. “Farmworkers report that when inspectors come to the farms, growers know they are coming, and they get to prepare,” says Mayra Reiter, project director of occupational safety and health for Farmworker Justice. “Inspectors don’t get to see what goes on day-to-day in those workplaces.”

Washington is considered one of the more progressive states in terms of farmworker protections. Yet between 2015 and 2019, Guarna discovered the average violation rate there was 418%, meaning that multiple violations were found on every inspection performed. 

In California, when violations are found, fines are often not levied, the report concluded. Even when penalties are issued, they’re often for amounts like $250 — token fines that growers consider to be part of the cost of doing business. Only a single case reported in California between 2019 and 2021 involved a grower being fined the more significant sum of $12,000.

Still, California is one of the few states that makes information readily available to the public about what chemicals are being applied where. Elsewhere, it’s virtually unknown. Washington, Florida, and Illinois do not require pesticide use reporting at all. 

“You have the farmworkers being directly exposed, and there’s so little transparency on what’s in our food,” Guarna says. “It’s not just farmworkers who are affected — drift is a big problem when it’s close to schools and neighborhoods. There’s just so little we know. A lot of the health effects happen years down the road.

In some instances, toxic exposure has become quickly and tragically evident when babies are born with birth defects. Within a span of seven weeks in 2004 and 2005, for example, three pregnant farmworkers who worked for the same tomato grower, Ag-Mart, in North Carolina and Florida, gave birth to babies with serious birth defects, like being born without arms or legs. Florida’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services issued two complaints against Ag-Mart in 2005, alleging 88 separate violations of pesticide use laws altogether. Ultimately, 75 of those violations were dismissed. Ag-Mart was fined a total of $11,400.

Yet thousands of poisonings continue to happen each year, Farmworker Justice says. In August 2019, for example, a field of farmworkers in central Illinois was sprayed with pesticides when the plane of a neighboring pesticide applicator flew directly overhead, the report noted. Several workers turned up at local emergency rooms with symptoms of chemical exposure. 

Despite these incidents, Illinois does not mandate that medical providers report suspected cases of exposure. Only because a medical provider at the hospital personally knew someone in the local public health department—who in turn contacted connections at the Illinois Migrant Council and Legal Aid Chicago—did the exposure result in legal action.

Workers often live on the farms where they work, exposing them to chemicals virtually round-the-clock, Reiter adds. “We know from farmworker testimonies that when they return to their homes, they can smell the pesticides, and it lingers for days after they return,” she says.

Vulnerable legal status can make it difficult for farmworkers to report exposures. Millions of farmworkers hail from Mexico, Guatemala, and elsewhere in Central America, according to Farmworker Justice, although significant numbers also come from countries like Jamaica and South Africa. An estimated half of farmworkers in the U.S. are undocumented. 

Millions of others come on H2-A guest-worker visas that allow them to come to the country for seasonal jobs of up to 10 months. These temporary visas are tied to specific employers, so workers fear being deported or otherwise retaliated against if they raise complaints about safety violations.

“Because [workers] are looked at as expendable, they’re regularly exposed to neurotoxic pesticides that can be carried into their home settings,” says agricultural policy expert Robert Martin, who recently retired from John Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. “They’re largely immigrants, and they don’t have a lot of legal protections. The advocates they do have, like Farmworker Justice, are terrific, but they’re really taken advantage of by the system because of their legal status.”

Inherent conflicts of interest also present legal loopholes. The state agencies charged with enforcing federal and state pesticide safety laws, like state Departments of Agriculture, are often the same agencies that promote the economic interests of the ag industry. And farmworkers know it. “That sort of cultural conflict is a big issue,” Guarna says. “Farmworkers have become deeply skeptical of departments of agriculture, and skeptical that they have farmworkers’ interests at heart. They fear their complaints are going to fall on deaf ears.”

While the EPA is legally required to maintain oversight over state agencies, in practice, they only require states to report about federally funded work—and the vast majority of state programs are funded by state budgets. Mandatory and universal standards for inspections and responses to violations would help tremendously, the report concludes. “One of our recommendations is that there should be whole-of-program reporting where states, tribes, and territories have to report all their activities,” Guarna says. “There are some very discrete fixes that can be made that would have a huge impact, so I am hopeful about that.”

Among the report’s 17 policy recommendations is to ensure that enforcement of pesticide safety gets delegated to an agency that is specifically tasked with protecting the health of workers. This could include transferring enforcement to state departments of labor or health, or even creating a new authority specifically dedicated to pesticide regulation.

“Exposed and At Risk” follows a previous report from the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems that focused on the two major threats facing farmworkers—heat stress and pesticide exposure. It focused on opportunities for states to take action to better protect farmworkers, and was written in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. That collaboration also led to a third report, called “Essential and in Crisis: A Review of the Public Health Threats Facing Farmworkers in the U.S.,” which recently explored the public health and environmental impacts of industrial agriculture. Martin, who co-authored these findings, explains that the concentrated power and wealth of large agribusiness companies has consequences for both worker safety and the environment. 

Following corporate consolidation since the 1980s, “there are fewer meat, seed, pesticide companies, and their combined economic power really keeps the status quo in place,” Martin says. ”There are some pretty direct public health threats of these operations.”

As “Exposed and at Risk,” notes, the regulatory system should be structured in a way that works to protect farmworkers. But currently, federal regulators lack sufficient data to even identify the tremendous gaps in enforcement. Requiring states to develop comprehensive reporting systems would be a small step toward protecting the foundation of American agriculture.

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Vermont Law and Graduate School, a private, independent institution, is home to a Law School that offers both residential and online hybrid JD programs and a Graduate School that offers master’s degrees and certificates in multiple disciplines, including programs offered by the School for the Environment, the Center for Justice Reform, and other graduate-level programs emphasizing the intersection of environmental justice, social justice and public policy. Both the Law and Graduate Schools strongly feature experiential clinical and field work learning. For more information, visit vermontlaw.edu, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The legal loopholes that threaten farmworkers’ health and safety on Jun 20, 2023.

If you want to see the latest way people are helping keep rural journalism healthy, look at Ohio.

When the media company Gannett closed the Oxford Press, the community paper in the town of Oxford, faculty at Miami University saw an opportunity to enlist their students in a hands-on learning experience providing local news.

They started the Oxford Observer, a weekly newspaper staffed by Miami students and professors. 

“It’s a community relationship, but it definitely benefits the students,” said Sacha DeVroomen Bellman, the Miami University journalism instructor who leads a class that acts as the paper’s newsroom. “This is a way they can get professional work.”

About 145 miles away, students at Ohio University are providing stories to the Athens County Independent, a digital start-up covering that county founded after its editor was unjustly fired from the area’s only daily paper. And faculty member Hans Meyer plans to keep ramping up stories from students.

To the north, at Kent State University, two faculty members lead the Ohio Newslab with a focus on providing stories to rural areas. The lab partners with four community news outlets that run stories from advanced reporting classes. The faculty have raised funds to pay students and an editor who works with the classes to shape up stories and mentor students. 

“We are covering some of the more sparsely populated sections of Ohio that don’t get much media attention,” said Susan Kirkman Zake, who coordinates the program with fellow faculty member Jacqueline Marino. “I really think that’s a good news niche for us to explore, both for students and the media landscape in Ohio, because media companies are really concentrated in cities.”  

And in the center of the state sits Denison University, which is revamping its journalism curriculum to empower student coverage of rural Licking County, Ohio. Those stories, published through The Reporting Project, are available for local media to pick up. When Intel announced the construction of a $20 billion chip plant in the city of New Albany, Denison’s project was the only media outlet to cover the project’s influence on its neighbors.

“We went and sat with Danny and Barbara Vanhoose, who have lived on Green Chapel Road for 50 years, right across the road from where Intel’s front door is going to be,” said Alan Miller, a Denison journalism professor who spent three decades at the Columbus Dispatch and covered the story with faculty member Jack Shuler and student Thu Nguyen.

“We just went and visited with them while they watched and got their reaction and had an outside-the-fence view, literally, of a very big news event that everybody else was covering from inside the fence,” he said.

Those four examples showcase a trend extending far beyond Ohio. Across the nation, student reporters and their colleges are stepping in as local news outlets disappear. At the Center for Community News, our team documents partnerships between local media and colleges, and in the last year we’ve found more than 120  — many focused on bolstering news in rural areas that have been neglected as big conglomerates eat up local dailies and whittle staffs to skeleton crews. 

The University of Vermont, where the center is housed, also runs a student reporting program that works with local media. In the last year, it has provided close to 300 stories for free to community papers and other local outlets. 

These programs are not internships in the traditional sense. Students of course can get great experiences interning directly with newsrooms, but many of those internships have disappeared, and beleaguered editors can’t be expected to dive deep with their rookies on each and every story. 

But colleges can. 

In university-led reporting programs, experienced former journalists vet and assign and edit student work and work with local news outlets to assign stories that otherwise would go uncovered. 

It’s a win-win. Papers get content and students get experience. 

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Richard Watts is the director of the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News, an organization that documents and brings together university-led reporting projects around the country. Justin Trombly is the editor of the Community News Service, the University of Vermont’s academic-media partnership.

The post Colleges and Students Are Stepping Up to Help Rural Newspapers appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Efforts by Montana legislators and Gov. Greg Gianforte to tackle Montana’s childcare shortage this year have produced several new laws, including measures that expand a program helping lower-income families pay for care and exempting small, in-home daycares from state licensing requirements.

The former measure, a $7-million-a-year expansion of the state’s Best Beginning’s program, had been a particular priority for Democrats and childcare advocates who had spent weeks waiting for word on whether Gianforte, a Republican, would sign the measure.

In a statement Wednesday, Gianforte’s office touted the expansion of the Best Beginnings program as part of his broader “pro-family, pro-jobs” budget.

Legislative Democrats had worried the Best Beginnings bill was becoming a political football as the governor sought to derail veto override efforts on other bills. In a statement Wednesday, they called the bill “the most significant investment in childcare in the state’s history.” 

“Ensuring Montana families have access to quality, affordable childcare means our economy can thrive — and so can our communities and kids,” bill sponsor Rep. Alice Buckley, D-Bozeman, said in the statement. “I am so proud we have finally taken action to address our state’s childcare crisis.” 

The Legislature passed the Best Beginnings bill, House Bill 648, April 28, but it was only transmitted to the governor for his signature this week after spending more than a month waiting on an administrative signature from Senate President Jason Ellsworth, R-Hamilton.

Childcare is both a major cost-of-living issue for Montana families and a significant economic challenge as the cost and availability of care limits how much many parents, women especially, can work at a time when the state is facing a tight labor market.

Research by the Montana Department of Labor & Industry estimates the state has licensed childcare capacity for only 43% of kids who need care. Labor department economists also say childcare for kids under 5 costs Montana families $16,269 on average in 2022 — a figure equivalent to a quarter of the state’s median household income and well above the 7%-of-income figure used as an affordability benchmark by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

(The labor department’s economists estimate that need by tabulating the number of kids under age 6 who live in homes where both parents are employed or actively looking for a job. They note that many working parents likely default to unlicensed care.)

That shortage, labor department economists say, has a direct impact on the state’s workforce. They estimate family responsibilities or a lack of childcare kept 23,000 Montana parents from working last year and forced another 45,000 to work fewer hours.

Tori Sproles, who runs Child Care Connections, a Bozeman-based agency that works with parents and childcare providers, said in a recent interview that the conundrum is that childcare is both prohibitively expensive for many families and a high-overhead industry that fails to pay well enough for childcare business owners and their staff to readily make ends meet.

“The biggest hurdle is the affordability of it on both ends,” Sproles said.

The Best Beginnings bill makes the program available to slightly higher-income families, shifting its eligibility cutoff from 150% to 185% of the federal poverty line. At the 185% level, a family of four would qualify for the program at an income of $55,000 a year and a single parent with one child would qualify with an annual income of $36,000.

The bill caps how much participating families pay, limiting their childcare expenses to 9% of their income. It also shifts the program’s reimbursement policy so that payments are no longer tied to attendance requirements — a policy that proponents say can put parents and providers in a bind if kids have too many sick days. 

The governor’s budget office estimates HB 648 would add about 700 children to the program and increase its cost by about $7 million a year.

Other bills focused solely on regulatory pieces of the childcare puzzle without putting additional public dollars toward subsidies.

Most notably, Rep. Jennifer Carlson, R-Manhattan, sponsored House Bill 556, which exempts many small, in-home daycare operations from licensing administered by the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services. Anyone caring for up to six kids in a private residence will no longer be required to seek a license unless they participate in Best Beginnings or other public subsidy programs.

The state’s existing regulations require licensing when someone is providing “supplemental parental care” to three or more kids, excluding their own children.

Carlson said recently that she thinks licensed daycare programs make sense in larger cities, particularly for families who don’t have a reliable network of family or friends to fall back on. But she argues it’s a different situation in small towns where people know their neighbors well enough to know who they trust looking after their kids and routinely flout the letter of the current rules.

“The government does not have to run every single part of our life,” Carlson said. “People have been watching other people’s children since the dawn of man.”

As the bill worked its way through the Legislature, opponents argued the state licensing process provides a way to ensure that people who are running childcare businesses are subject to requirements like background checks, home safety inspections and first-aid training.

Sproles, who testified against the bill, said in May that people who provide unregulated care have rarely been prosecuted. She also said she’s concerned that exempting more small providers from licensing could put parents in situations where they mistakenly assume a daycare provider has been vetted by the appropriate authorities.

“There are people out there who drop off their kids to people they don’t know — and nobody in that house is going to be background checked,” Sproles said. 

“Just because someone has a license isn’t a guarantee of safety,” countered Carlson, pointing to a 2022 audit that found the health department had in three cases approved childcare licenses at addresses also listed as the residence of someone on the state’s sexual and violent offender registry. “As a parent, it’s your responsibility to know who’s watching your kids, not the state’s.”

Another bill sponsored by Buckley, House Bill 187, explicitly defines providing home-based childcare as a “residential” use of property rather than a “commercial” one, a statutory tweak intended to shield small daycare providers from being constrained by restrictive homeowners association covenants. It passed with bipartisan support and was signed by the governor April 19.

Gianforte also approved a Republican-sponsored bill, brought by Rep. Terry Falk, R-Kalispell, to relax some currently required daycare center staffing ratios, allowing among other changes a 6-to-1 instead of a 4-to-1 provider-to-child ratio for 1-year-olds and a 20-to-1 rather than a 14-to-1 ratio for kids 6 and older. The new law, House Bill 422, also allows some staffers caring for kids 2 and older to work in another room during nap periods.

Falk argued the changes better align Montana law with national standards and will make it easier for childcare centers to pay workers sustainable wages. Opponents countered that they believe the lower ratios are necessary to keep kids safe and that loosening the regulations will make childcare workers more likely to burn out. The bill passed with support from all Republicans and opposition from nearly all Democrats.

Democrats brought several other bills, unsuccessfully, to put additional public dollars into childcare support. One bill would have created a $1,600-a-year tax credit to supplement childcare worker wages. Another would have put $150 million from the state’s budget surplus into a childcare trust fund, where interest earnings would have been used to produce a long-term revenue source for childcare scholarships.

Sproles said she was pleased with the conversation that happened around childcare at the Legislature but thinks more action will be necessary to address the challenge.

“We’re not done,” she said. “These are baby steps toward some of the bigger things we need to tackle as a state.”

The post Childcare is scarce and spendy. Here’s what Montana lawmakers are doing about it appeared first on Montana Free Press.

After 15 years of planning and permitting, construction will begin this year on the TransWest Express high-voltage transmission line — a milestone expansion of Wyoming’s electric power export industry to markets in the American Southwest and one of the largest transmission upgrades to the western grid in decades.

The Bureau of Land Management granted TransWest Express LLC a “notice to proceed” in April, culminating years of work and millions of dollars invested in a “vision” to bring Wyoming’s renewable energy potential to the rest of the West, according to company officials.

“It’s a day that’s been long coming,” TransWest Express Executive Vice President and COO Roxane Perruso said. A groundbreaking event will take place Tuesday, she said, with a special appreciation for the Carbon County community’s integral support. That support represented a leap-of-faith for a region with its cultural and economic roots in coal.

Power project

While TransWest Express LLC was mired in planning and a painstaking bureaucratic permitting process that included obtaining rights-of-way from hundreds of entities across the 732-mile route, its affiliate Power Company of Wyoming was already doing preliminary construction work on the wind farm that will energize the line. The Anschutz Corporation owns both companies. 

The Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind energy project will span some 320,000 acres in Carbon County and generate 3,000 megawatts of electricity — representing about 28% of Wyoming’s current electrical generation capacity today, according to U.S. Energy Information data. It will be the largest onshore wind energy facility in North America, according to Power Company of Wyoming.

Phased construction of the 732-mile TransWest Express high voltage transmission system will begin later this year, according to company officials. The first phase includes a new substation in Carbon County. From there, crews will erect towers and string high-voltage lines to a station in Delta, Utah. That portion of the project will initially begin moving up to 1,500 megawatts of wind-generated electricity via direct current by December 2027. 

The second phase includes an alternate current line to connect with other powerline systems in southern Nevada. By the end of 2028, the final phases of the system will ramp up to 3,000 megawatts and four system interconnections in the Southwest, according to TransWest Express officials.

“These components will provide important new bulk transmission capacity and connectivity with the PacifiCorp system in Wyoming, with the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power and Intermountain Power systems in Utah, with the NV Energy system in Nevada and with the California Independent System Operator,” Perruso said. 

New dynamic

Aside from transporting power from Wyoming’s Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind facility, TransWest may also serve as an onramp for other energy projects, such as the hydrogen energy proposal at the Intermountain Power Project in Utah, and potentially new nuclear power facilities, according to TransWest officials.

“As Wyoming looks at more carbon-free [energy] resources, we are going to be that pathway that allows those resources to get to the market,” Perruso said. “We’re opening up the new market for renewables and also creating a pathway for future carbon-free resources.”

Some clean energy and climate advocates hail the TransWest Express project as a vital step forward in “decarbonizing” the western grid. Once completed, the transmission line will serve as a “backbone,” increasing connectivity between large demand centers — southern Nevada, Utah and southern California — and rural areas that can generate commercial-scale renewable energy, such as Wyoming’s abundant capacity for wind power generation.

“This is an example of infrastructure that is needed and should be built,” Western Resource Advocates Deputy Director of Regional Markets Vijay Satyal said. “It is definitely very important for the West.”

Together, the TransWest line and CCSM wind facility represent a new dynamic — as well as a gamble that too few entities have been willing or able to take on, according to Satyal and other utility market watchers. It’s a rare move that requires a lot of patience with the permitting process, according to one TransWest Express official, as well as deep pockets, according to others.

Going independent

Most consumers don’t get to choose their electricity provider, whether they’re powering a home in Casper or a chain restaurant in Evanston, but the TransWest project diverges from that paradigm. For example, PacifiCorp, which also operates as Rocky Mountain Power, is one of several electric utility monopolies in Wyoming. It serves captive customers in certain areas because, generally speaking, it owns the power infrastructure exclusively.

As a monopoly, PacifiCorp is regulated by the Wyoming Public Service Commission, as well as service commissions in the five other states it operates. It is required to justify and win approval for its electricity rates. In return, it has a guaranteed, captive ratepayer base to finance system operations and necessary upgrades.

There are variations, such as rural electric co-ops that work under different sets of rules and authorities. But the same geographically limited market for grid infrastructure plays out all over Wyoming, the West and the nation. Although utilities like PacifiCorp are shifting from burning coal to cleaner forms of electric generation within their own service territories, Satyal said, it isn’t enough to achieve the level of connectivity between hundreds of individual service systems to allow for new sources of renewable and low-carbon energy.

The strategy behind Power Company of Wyoming and TransWest Express is to operate as independent merchants, selling and delivering renewable and low-carbon energy to any utility it can reach via the three major operating regions that TransWest will connect to on the western grid.

“We’re broadening the [Wyoming and western] market to include these new interconnections and new customers,” Perruso said. “We’re not constrained by a service territory.

“That also means it’s risky,” Perruso continued. “This is why you don’t see [a lot of] developers doing this, because it’s a risky and an entrepreneurial proposition.”

Big gamble, deep pockets 

Unlike a regulated utility, neither TransWest Express LLC nor Power Company of Wyoming have a captive ratepayer base to leverage upfront financing or a guaranteed paying customer base for ongoing operations. That’s where both the gamble and the deep pockets come in.

Both companies are affiliates of the Denver-based Anschutz Corporation. The worldwide oil, investment, sports, real estate, entertainment and publishing company headed by Philip Anschutz is worth some $10.8 billion, according to Forbes.

“Thanks to the deep pockets or the financial muscle the owners had, they survived a long [permitting] process to comply with all the environmental requirements,” Satyal said. “This is a good example of a company seeing the value proposition and the economic benefits of exporting Wyoming-rich wind and moving into the decarbonization of the future.”

TransWest Express doesn’t yet have customers contracted to take the power it plans to deliver from Wyoming. But, Satyal said, the rush to renewables to meet self-imposed carbon emission standards — particularly in the Southwest — is a good bet with a potentially lucrative payoff.

“God forbid California has a reliability crisis. This line will be a very important lifeline in providing energy — and at high [profit],” he said. “That’s competition at work, which I think is what Wyoming wants to support — a competitive market.”

Wyoming Energy Authority Executive Director Rob Creager agrees.

“Our state is in the business of producing and selling world-class energy,” Creager said. “So projects like TransWest Express opening up entirely new consumer markets for our energy products have tremendous potential for Wyoming.”

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