Building a $155 million solar farm with hundreds of solar panels in hail alley in southeastern Wyoming might seem a crazy idea for some.
Not Paul Stroud, a director of Cowboy Energy LLC, who sits in safely removed from the worst of the hail in Sheridan in the northern part of Wyoming.
Stroud cited a significant hailstorm that swept through a Scottsbluff, Nebraska, solar farm last summer that left behind ding marks and cracked panels when baseball-sized hail pounded the glassy panel surfaces.
Another report emerged out of the Houston area this month of splintered solar panels caused by big hail balls again.
Stroud, a four-decade veteran of developing geothermal projects around the globe, pooh-poohed on all of these concerns.
Cowboy Energy, based in Las Vegas but run by Stroud out of Sheridan, and his partner Hezy Ram, a geothermal and alternative energy expert, have teamed up with Portugal-based Greenvolt Power to build what they think will be a hail-resistant solar farm in Goshen County.
The backers of this Goshen Solar project plan to build nearly 326,000 solar panels spread over 1,200 acres, situated about 15 miles southwest of Yoder — about an hour’s drive northeast of the state’s capital city, Cheyenne.
And if the hail comes, no problem.