I am here at a giant wind farm outside of Medicine Bo, Wyoming, and it is very windy.

Sammy Roth is our energy reporter, and this spring he went to Wyoming to see construction on what's eventually going to be America's largest wind farm.

One of the craziest things about this wind farm that we're going to see is that they're basically building it on spec.

So yeah, the wind farm owners don't even have a buyer yet,

but California is trying to go carbon neutral by 2045, which means it's going to need a lot of green energy.

So there's a good chance the state will eventually need to rely on Wyoming.

What makes this such a good place to build wind power?

It's the way the wind comes through the mountains here.

It is windy in a lot of areas.

But this wind farm has taken years to develop

and actually getting all that power to California,

it's turning into an issue.

Some conservationists and residents

who live along the power line aren't happy about it.

We can't afford to squander our opportunity to save the little fragments of wildness that we have left.

I'm Gustav Ariano. You're listening to the Times, essential news from the L.A. Times.

It's Wednesday, September 7, 2022.

Today, what it takes to make America's largest wind farm operational, and who bears

the brunt of that?

Sammy, welcome to Times.

Happy to be here, Gustavo.

Man, when I heard you were doing a story about a huge wind farm for California, I thought, okay, maybe he's going to Imperial County down on the U.S.-Mexico border or higher up north in Shasta County. I didn't think Wyoming. Yeah, I mean, this is the biggest wind farm that's being proposed and built in the Western United States and the country as well. So it's, you know, if you want to write about wind energy and you want to do it on a big scale, this is the place to go. I'd actually been to this site once before back in 2016, a previous reporting job. And, you know, that was 10 years into their process. And now it's five years later, six years later. And they're finally building the thing. So I thought, okay, I want to go back and see how things have changed and see the process.

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