Wind and Solar Leasing in Niobrara County, Wyoming

The Sidewinder Clean Hydrogen Center: a real, currently-paying wind lease west of Lusk

Sidewinder H2, LLC -- a joint venture between ACCIONA and Nordex Green Hydrogen, developed locally with Focus Clean Energy -- is working to build a wind farm roughly 10 miles west of Lusk to power a clean-hydrogen production facility. The project footprint spans 120,110 acres, of which about 23,290 acres (19.4%) is Wyoming state trust land and the rest is private. Plans call for hundreds of wind turbines with an estimated capacity around 1,000 megawatts, feeding a roughly 50-acre electrolysis and hydrogen-synthesis facility rather than selling raw electricity to the grid. Company and county figures put the project's local economic impact at roughly 200 long-term jobs and up to $20 million a year in new county and school tax revenue over an anticipated 35-year life -- a very large number for a county with roughly 2,500 residents total.

The company has stated the project leases land only from willing private landowners and will not use eminent domain. Public reporting describes lease payments already made to Niobrara County landowners as running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars to date, with millions more expected as the project advances -- real money, not a speculative future promise. If you're a landowner in the project's footprint being approached about a lease, or a buyer evaluating land already under one, get the actual lease document: per-acre or per-turbine payment structure, term length, and what happens to your payment obligations if the project is delayed, scaled back, or cancelled.

How the county reviews a project like this without a zoning ordinance

As the county hub explains, Niobrara County has no zoning code -- it operates on its 2025 Land Use Plan instead. That doesn't mean a project this size gets no local review: Sidewinder has gone through Niobrara County's Planning & Zoning board, which as of mid-2025 was still in the early stages of hearing from the company's representatives under the framework the Land Use Plan provides. For a landowner, the practical difference from a zoned county is that there's no fixed setback table, permitted-use list, or conditional-use checklist to consult in advance -- review here is more case-by-case and plan-based, so confirm the current status and any conditions directly with the Planning & Zoning board rather than assuming a standard process applies.

The state just voted to cancel the state-land portion of the lease -- but not the private leases

This is the detail most likely to matter if you're evaluating land here: on February 5, 2026, Wyoming's Board of Land Commissioners (three of five members -- the Auditor, Secretary of State, and Superintendent of Public Instruction, over the dissenting votes of the Governor and State Treasurer) voted to begin canceling State Trust Land leases 1620 and 1625, covering the Sidewinder project in Niobrara County and the sibling Pronghorn project in Converse County. The move followed a Converse County judge's ruling that the board's original April 2025 approval of the Pronghorn lease was unlawful. A follow-up motion by Secretary of State Chuck Gray to continue the cancellation failed 2-3 in June 2026, so the state-land question remains genuinely unresolved as of this writing, and the state has separately appealed the underlying court ruling.

Crucially, this cancellation effort targets only the roughly 23,290 acres of state trust land in the project footprint -- the private landowner leases making up the other 80.6% of the acreage are not directly subject to the Board of Land Commissioners' authority and continue on their own terms regardless of how the state-land dispute resolves, though a large reduction in the project's overall footprint could still affect the economics of the whole development. A local opposition group, Niobrara County Against Sidewinder, has organized against the project on wildlife, visual-impact, and way-of-life grounds and is worth reviewing directly for the community's other side of this debate.