A green golden opportunity
Looking to spur clean energy investment in Wyoming? Aim for wealthy town of Jackson
If the area around Jackson, Wyoming, boasts two things, they’re natural resources and very rich locals. Nathan Wendt is trying to use the Biden administration’s clean energy incentives to bring the two together.
Wendt, president of the Jackson Hole Center for Global Affairs, has spent years working on issues related to climate change and local economic development. And as President Joe Biden pushed one climate-related policy after another through Congress — first the infrastructure law, then the Inflation Reduction Act — and a dizzying array of tax credits, loans and grants became available, he sensed an opportunity.
“For Jackson Hole investors looking for the next big thing, there’s no need to look beyond state lines,” Wendt wrote this spring in an opinion essay in The Jackson Hole News & Guide, where he extolled the “flush tax credits” the law provides. “This decade’s great money-making opportunity,” he wrote, “will be in investing in net zero projects in energy communities, including in Wyoming.”
Wyoming is both the nation’s largest coal producer and a GOP stronghold where the clean energy transition has at times faced stark opposition. Its entire congressional delegation voted against the Inflation Reduction Act. But the state is unusually well suited to benefit from some of the green incentives the government is offering.
Wyoming’s geology and legal landscape make it a top candidate for fledgling carbon capture technologies, which the law promotes through sweetened and extended tax credits. Its existing pipeline infrastructure and energy industry workforce could help with hydrogen development. And, perhaps most important, the state has plenty of people whom the Inflation Reduction Act is courting — well-heeled investors who are looking for a way to turn a profit off the green energy transition.
The Biden administration’s climate law works by attracting private capital to clean energy. While the plan includes targeted grants, many of its potentially most significant provisions aim to transition the nation’s energy supply — and its energy workforce — by luring people with capital to invest. Tax breaks and other incentives mean it’s more attractive to make financial bets on risky, but possibly transformational, green technologies.
That has Wendt and other climate researchers across the state looking at Jackson, a town full of potential investors who could pour money into new projects. The elite enclave boasts the highest-income county in the United States, by some measures. And, Wendt reasons, many of its millionaires and billionaires work in financial markets but decamped from big coastal cities because they loved the natural beauty that Wyoming has to offer. They might, he figures, have both the money and the motivation to make local climate investment a reality.
“Teton County has been historically disconnected from the wider Wyoming economic story,” Wendt said on a late August morning in Jackson’s town square. “We’re trying to bridge that gap.”
Wyoming, for its part, could be well placed to take advantage of some of the law’s more cutting-edge provisions. Some estimates have suggested that the state could see the largest per capita investment related to the legislation of any state in the nation.