Energy Landscapes: Wyoming Transmission

Wyoming’s transmission corridors are among the most visually dramatic in North America. Long-span towers cross uninhabited terrain for hundreds of miles, carrying power from wind farms and legacy coal plants to distant load centres. The scale is legible from the highway in a way it isn’t from a city — the infrastructure occupies the landscape completely.

The state’s wind resource is among the best on the continent, but the transmission constraints binding it to load are equally substantial. New lines are in planning. The existing corridors were built in a different energy era, to a different generation mix.

This series documents the physical geography of energy infrastructure during a period of active transition — the old capacity still operating, the new capacity being built alongside it, the grid caught between two eras simultaneously.