How tiny Kit Carson County has grown into a green energy giant ...Middle East

Cattle graze through corn stalks near the Dusty Rose Wind Project near Stratton in Kit Carson County on Jan. 30. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)

BURLINGTON

From his front door, Rick Gaddy is watching a forest rise on the Eastern Plains of Kit Carson County. In January he counted 30 tall columns standing on the horizon, a few weeks later there were 50 and now he thinks there are more than 100.

They aren’t trees, but towers for wind turbines that are spouting in the farm fields as the county is experiencing a renewable energy building boom led by three wind farm projects that will dot farmland with more than 300 turbines.

“It is just going to change the landscape out here,” Gaddy said, adding “not that we don’t already have a lot of wind farms.”

Kit Carson County is home to eight wind farms generating about 2.9 terawatt-hours of electricity a year — roughly equal to the amount of electricity used by Boulder County, according to GridInfo, a national electricity database.

That figure is set to rise with the two projects under construction and at least four more wind farms in various stages of permitting and planning. 

The county is also in the process of permitting a solar installation. One solar-plus-battery installation has been permitted and a second solar-plus-storage project is applying for a permit, as is a standalone battery storage facility.

“There are maybe five others kicking around,” said Kelly Alvarez, who oversees planning applications — as well as restaurant inspections — for the eastern Colorado county. “It is hard to keep up.”

Alvarez keeps tabs on an erasable white board in her office.

In the last few months, three renewable energy developers have stopped by the county commission meeting to present their projects, Commissioner Dave Hornung said.

The boom is being spurred by a combination of factors. Colorado energy and climate policies have focused on “clean” technologies. For example, under state law electric utilities have to reduce their greenhouse gas emission 80% from 2005 levels by 2030.

At the same time wind and solar have become the cheapest form of electricity generation with utility-scale solar dropping 80% since 2010 to about $40 a megawatt-hour and wind costs cut by more than half  between 2012 and 2020 to $33 per MW hour

As for why Kit Carson County? Xcel Energy’s $1.7 billion Power Pathway high-voltage transmission project, designed to bring generation from the plains to the Front Range runs through the county,

Xcel Energy called it a “field of dreams” project with the hopes that if the utility built it energy developers would come. Well they are coming to Kit Carson County.

“We are not promoting renewable energy out here in Kit Carson County, but our landowners decided they want to lease ground and we believe in property rights,” Hornung said. “Even though some property owners do not necessarily want anything to do with them.”

The Kit Carson renewable energy boom comes at a time the Trump administration is cutting support for wind and solar, removing federal tax credits, canceling projects, limiting projects on federal land and slowing permitting.

The loss of the federal Production Tax Credit — which provides a credit equal to 2.75 cents for each kilowatt-hour of electricity a project generates during its first 10 years — has been key for wind projects.

The Trump administration has limited the tax credits to those projects that start construction by July 4, 2026. Projects starting after that date must be in operation by the end of 2027 to get the credit.

“President Trump, as far as he is concerned, wants to stop funding for all your projects,” Bill Korbelik, chairman of the county planning commission, said to Tristan Wheeler, a project manager for NextEra Energy, which is developing two of the wind projects, during a January meeting.

“We have credits through 2030,” Wheeler said. “After that things could change.”

NextEra said in an email that it expects its renewable energy projects to qualify for federal tax incentives through 2030. “Even as those incentives phase down, renewable energy generation remains highly competitive energy options,” said Amanda Paez, a company spokesperson.

Korbelik asked if the Trump tariffs would be a hurdle. “The tariffs are not going to prevent us” from completing the project, Wheeler said.

Juno Beach, Florida-based NextEra Energy, the county’s biggest wind developer, built its first Kit Carson County wind project — the 150-megawatt Carousel wind farm — in 2015.

The company has upgraded the farm and is expanding it with Carousel 3 and Carousel 4 — each 150 MW of generation with storage.

The wind farm Gaddy is keeping an eye on from his front door is the NextEra’s $834 million Dusty Rose I, with 178 turbines able to generate up to 500 MW of electricity. The project is slated to be in service by the end of 2027.

Dusty Rose I sprawls across a total of 54,000 acres of golden corn-stalk stubble dotted with green patches of winter wheat, south of the town of Stratton, population 656. There are an estimated 300 construction workers on the site.

There are headless towers awaiting turbines, towers with their turbines and blades standing motionless until the day the farm goes online. Stacks of wind turbine blades, more than 100-feet long, lay on the ground awaiting the giant crane that will host them, with a turbine, to the top of the towers.

Convoys of work trucks with flatbed trailers of blades move across the landscape and at the staging site a banner celebrates “Red, White and Green” American energy.

In the spring of 2027, NextEra plans to start work on Dusty Rose II, a $200 million project that will add another 175 MW of generating capacity, which will need 300 construction workers.

NextEra is the largest renewable energy producer in Colorado. Its 19 projects have a total of  3,000 MW of generation and storage capacity. Among the counties hosting the company’s projects are Weld, Logan, Pueblo, El Paso, Lincoln, Elbert, Arapaho and Cheyenne.

“NextEra Energy Resources has invested approximately $4.8 billion in Colorado and pays about $11 million annually in landowner payments,” Paez said. “The company looks forward to continuing to work with the state of Colorado, Kit Carson County and local communities.”

Just about 8 miles east of Stratton and south of Vona, population 95, Apex Energy’s Singing Grass wind farm is also rising from the plains. The installation, covering more than 52,000 acres, will generate up to 600 MW from 135 turbines.

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Charlotte, Virginia-based Apex Energy, the developer of more than 90 renewable energy projects across the county, has built Singing Grass for Xcel Energy, and it is set to be online this year.

The company has two more wind farms on the drawing board for Kit Carson County: the 500 MW Lynx wind farm and the 250 MW Bobcat Wind installation — both projected to go online in 2029.

In February, Cordelio Power, which builds and operates wind, solar and storage facilities across the U.S. and Canada, appeared before the county planning commission seeking the OK to erect meteorological towers near Flager, population 597.

The meteorological towers will be used to characterize the timing and strength of wind on the site where Cordelio, which is owned by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, plans to put a 400 MW wind farm.

“This is a competitive area. That is why there is a lot of activity,” NextEra’s Wheeler told the county commission. When asked if NextEra had a purchaser for Dusty Rose’s power, Wheeler said, “We don’t. We are exploring our options.”

The majority of the electricity generated in the county goes to either Xcel Energy or the Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, although NextEra did develop the Bronco Plains wind farm for Holy Cross Energy, a Western Slope cooperative, and Guzman Energy, a power wholesaler.

Where do all those workers live?

In addition to wind farms, which have been a fixture in the county since 2010 — the first was the 51 MW Kit Carson Windpower project built by Duke Energy for Tri-State — solar and storage projects are now turning up.

The Open Prairie Solar and Storage Project — 300 MW of solar and 300 MW of storage — is being built by RWE, an multinational energy developer. It received planning commission approval to move ahead with permitting in March.

In April, ibV Energy Partners is scheduled to appear before the planning commission to present its plan for a 225 MW solar facility.

All this activity ripples through the community in a variety of ways. One of the first is traffic. During the fall harvests there were some traffic jams with farmers and wind farm contractors filling the roads, said Hornung, the county commissioner.

“During the project, it’s pretty hard to maintain these roads,” he said. “They get beat up pretty good.” The wind farm companies are required to repair the roads when they are finished.

“But it may take a year or two, after the project kind to recover and get things back to normal,” he said.

Another challenge is a housing shortage as upward of a thousand workers flood into a county with a population of about 7,100.

“Housing hasn’t been a problem even though this is a small town, but now all the housing has been eaten up,” said Logan Hardin, a spokesperson for the Burlington Chamber of Commerce and general manager of cattle feedlots in the area.

This poses a potential problem for any employer looking to bring new hires into the county, he said. The housing shortage has led to existing RV parks expanding and new ones sprouting up.

On the flip side, business is booming for hotels, restaurants and shops in Burlington.

The Dish Room, local folks will tell a visitor is the best restaurant in Burlington, is regularly packed. “Right before Christmas, before they left for their break, they were calling in for parties of 30, 20, 15, just every day of the week,” the restaurant’s owner Jenna Zimbelman-Gutierrez said.

When the workers left for the holidays, business dropped, Zimbelman-Gutierrez said. They will, however, be back.

“Some, some of the guys that I talked to who are coming to the restaurant say they’re planning on being here for another year or two minimum to finish everything up,” she said.

Zimbelman-Gutierrez also took over her grandparents’ Burlington jewelry store. “A couple of guys came in and I sold one an engagement ring, and then he just told his friend, one of his coworkers, about it. So, his coworker came in last week and he’s going to buy a ring.”

“That was a $10,000 sale, and now a $20,000 sale,” she said. “So that’s a huge, huge bump for me.”

The wind farm building boom’s impact isn’t only in sales, but also in contributions by the companies to a host of local organizations and activities, Zimbelman-Gutierrez said.

For example, every year the chamber of commerce puts up Christmas banners. A local nonprofit launched an initiative to participate in the national Military Tribute Banner program, but when they got the banners it turned out they required different brackets for the light poles than those used at Christmas.

“Mortenson, one of the construction companies, came in and paid for all the brackets for the veterans so they could hang those banners,” Zimbelman-Gutierrez said.

A property tax boom for Kit Carson County

The wind farms are also on their way to becoming the biggest source of county property taxes. In 2024, agriculture and renewable energy each had the highest assessment rate, a little over 26%, each valued at about $27 million. 

Wind farms are paying an estimated $2 million a year in taxes. That does not include the three wind projects underway or the additional ones that are planned.

NextEra’s Wheeler told the county planning board that Dusty Rose I will deliver $12 million in property taxes over the life of the project. Across all its operations NextEra said it makes $10.7 million in payments to landowners and pays $5.2 million in property taxes annually.

Will Toor, the executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, said while Kit Carson County may be a hot spot, it is representative of a continued push across the state for renewable energy.

“We have seen really significant renewable energy growth in Colorado,” Toor said. “We’ve gone from just under 25% of electricity coming from renewables in 2019 to, in the data I have for 2025 … to 43%.”

“So, I think we’re continuing to see significant growth in renewables across the state, and you know, we anticipate that that will continue,” Toor said.

Kit Carson County started drafting a land use code for wind farms back in 2009. “We realized it was coming,” Hornung said. 

At the January meeting where the Dusty Rose and Carousel projects were reviewed, the commission wondered what else was coming. They spoke of solar, data centers and even nuclear power. 

“Do we need nuclear regulations?” Hornung wondered.

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