Quarterly Elected Officials Meeting Held on August 20, 2025

This quarter’s Elected Officials meeting was hosted by the City of Cheyenne and held at the beautiful Cheyenne Botanical Gardens. Pine Bluff’s, Albin, and Burns representatives did not have much to report this time around.

Chairman Malm discussed the recent passage of the Laramie County Land Use Regulation update. He noted that it was unfortunate that so much misinformation had been spread on social media regarding what would be affected by the updated regulations. In the end, however, accurate information presented by the Commission and the Planning Director alleviated the vast majority of concerns. He relayed that the Commission voted unanimously to remove the Home Occupancy regulations from the final draft and emphasized that there was never any intent to prohibit children from having lemonade stands, nor were there any regulations mandating permits to sell eggs, baked goods, or raise 4-H livestock projects.

Mayor Collins spoke about the Crusoe and Tallgrass 1.8-gigawatt artificial intelligence (AI) data center project slated for construction in Cheyenne. The facility will be powered by its own natural gas power plant, with the ability to also draw upon renewable resources in the region. The natural gas emissions will be captured and funneled into Tallgrass’s CO2 sequestration hub, providing a long-term solution for carbon capture. Mayor Collins indicated that he has been receiving calls from community members concerned about the strain on local water and power resources caused by the data centers. However, based on his conversations with Black Hills Energy and the Board of Public Utilities, the impact on our community’s resources is not as significant as it is in other parts of the country.

Due to our cooler climate, it takes less energy to maintain data center servers. Coupled with Wyoming’s regulatory environment, which empowers utilities to require large power-load customers to acquire electricity on the open market, and the fact that the Crusoe and Tallgrass project will be building its own multi-gigawatt power plant to support the facility, power requirements from the data centers will not increase the energy rates of residential customers. Regarding water usage, the data centers utilize a closed-loop water system to cool their facilities, with expendable water being used for the same purposes as any other commercial building—i.e., restrooms, food preparation, and landscaping. The Mayor noted that all of the data centers combined use only about 140 acre-feet of water per year, which is equivalent to the amount of water used by approximately 556 residential homes per year. 

I reached out to both Black Hills Energy and the Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities, and they verified the information provided by Mayor Collins.