About 24% of the US population resides in the West, a region already profoundly affected by climate change. In 2021 nearly 95% of the American West was characterized by drought conditions, and anyone who lives on this side of the country knows that wildfires and rolling blackouts are now the norm rather than the exception. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Los Angeles Times energy reporter, Sammy Roth, about this energy-hungry region. We get an in-depth look at a big wind power project in Wyoming, examine the increasing water needs of one of California’s agricultural regions, and get a glimpse into the latest LA Times energy-related project, Repowering the West.

00:01 Narrator - This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.

00:18 Sammy Roth (SR) - It's a little bit of a, you know, sort of go slow to go fast situation. There's a need to speed up the construction of renewable energy really dramatically to get the emissions reductions in greenhouse gases that we need. But if you just try to do that too fast without thinking through this stuff you're going to, you're going to get stopped in a lot of places.

00:37 Narrator - About 24% of the US population resides in the West, a region already profoundly affected by climate change. In 2021 nearly 95% of the American West was characterized by drought conditions, and anyone who lives on this side of the country knows that wildfires and rolling blackouts are now the norm rather than the exception. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Los Angeles Times energy reporter, Sammy Roth, about this energy-hungry region. We get an in-depth look at a big wind power project in Wyoming, examine the increasing water needs of one of California’s agricultural regions, and get a glimpse into the latest LA Times energy-related project, Repowering the West.

01:40 Alex Wise (AW) - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Sammy Roth. He's an energy reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Sammy, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.

01:48 Sammy Roth (SR) - Hey Alex, happy to be here.

01:50 AW - So you've been traveling quite a lot for your work with the LA Times, and you have a very bold project called Repowering the West. Why don't you explain the general concept to listeners as it moves forward?

02:08 SR - So the project we're calling it repowering the West. It's a series of stories about how the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables is reshaping landscapes and ecosystems and rural communities in different parts of the western United States. And what are the benefits and the opportunities of that and what are their challenges and the roadblocks to that. So we're planning to do at least six stories in this series. And the first one that I reported out in in May, and it was just published recently by the Times, spent a week traveling across four states. So we started in Wyoming at the construction site of what's going to be the largest wind farm in the United States in southern Wyoming.  And then we traveled across Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and Nevada going along the route of the power line that's going to be built across 730 miles to get the electricity from this remote wind farm to Southern California where the where the energy is needed. So that was that was part one and several more parts to come.

03:08 AW - When you go on these on site projects, how are you able to carve a narrative out of looking at these big, seemingly impenetrable utility projects? It must be a challenge.

03:23 SR - It is a challenge and you know it gets easier when you've been doing this over a period of time, right? So I've been covering energy in the western United States...