By David Wojick
The Wyoming wind power permitting authority has a formal hearing beginning on August 31, 2026, to consider the application from a major wind project. An approval decision on this project would be premature, because a crucial piece of environmental data, the projected eagle kills from the project, is still in progress.
Wyoming needs to decide how many eagles it is willing to kill.
The permitting authority is the Wyoming Industrial Siting Council. At issue is the proposed 650-megawatt Laramie Range Wind Project with hundreds of eagle-killing turbines. This is a very large project.
The Siting Council is supposed to carefully consider the environmental impacts of the project, but there is a glaring gap in their information. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is supposed to predict the number of eagles killed by this project but has yet to do so. The Siting Council should wait for this crucial data.
Of particular concern are the golden eagles because Wyoming is central to their population. This population has reportedly declined by an incredible 30% since wind development began two decades ago. See my article, “Wyoming Golden Eagles should be listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.”
FWS normally estimates the golden eagle death rate for a wind project when that project applies for a permit to kill eagles under the Eagle Protection Act. In this case, Wyoming should ask FWS to do the calculations directly for them, not via the wind project developer. To the extent the developer’s eagle-related data is being used, it needs to be verified.
The FWS uses what is called a Collision Risk Model to predict golden eagle deaths from a proposed wind turbine array. The model output is a probability distribution, not a single death number. There is a probability for a given number of deaths.
For eagle-kill permitting purposes, the FWS uses the number of deaths with an 80% probability of occurring. The Siting Council might also want to consider numbers like the 50% and 30% death rates, which will be increasingly larger than the 80% rate. These lower-probability death rates are still serious likelihoods, calling for appropriate caution.
If the FWS will not provide these golden eagle death calculations, then Wyoming should develop them itself. The Siting Council must have the relevant eagle death data before it can make an informed decision on the huge Laramie Range Wind Project.
It is likely that the eagle-killing issue will come up at the Siting Council hearing where project opponents will testify.
The Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality has provided the following information on viewing the hearing, which begins each day at 10:00 am Mountain Daylight Time:
“Persons wishing to observe day one of the permit hearing on August 31, 2026, may watch the hearing virtually via this information.
“Persons wishing to observe day two of the permit hearing on September 1, 2026, may watch the hearing virtually via this information.”
Wind turbines killing eagles cannot be ignored.
