The Next American Energy Economy Is Already Built

By Nathan Wendt

America’s next energy build-out is already underway. Artificial intelligence, electrification, and industrial reshoring are driving electricity consumption at levels not seen in a generation. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects demand will hit record levels in both 2025 and 2026. The scale of what is required is unlike anything built in decades. The frameworks that have defined how America builds energy in the past—greenfield development, environmental goals treated as constraints, and local benefit as an afterthought—are out of date. They are too slow, too contested, and too disconnected from the communities that will host this infrastructure for generations. A faster, more durable approach is possible: one that aligns energy growth with community prosperity and environmental outcomes from the start. The question is where that approach begins.

Look to Campbell County, Wyoming to start. The state of Wyoming is already an energy powerhouse on the national stage, producing around 12x more energy than the state consumes. Roughly 40% of the nation’s coal comes from Wyoming, most of it mined in Campbell County and the Powder River Basin. But the next energy build-out won’t be only about coal. It is about what Campbell County built in service of coal: the transmission infrastructure, the industrial land, the rail network, the skilled workforce, and the can-do culture. Those assets, accumulated over a century, are now perfectly positioned for the next era of American energy leadership. And unlike greenfield locations starting from scratch, they come with something no permit or capital infusion can create quickly: a community that knows how to build, wants to build, and has built before.

It is already happening. In December 2025, the Wyoming Energy Authority awarded $100 million to BWXT to build a TRISO nuclear fuel fabrication facility in Campbell County; BWXT matched that with $473 million of its own capital, a $573 million total investment employing 200 direct workers and nearly 200 more indirect jobs. Campbell County is ideal for this kind of investment. 

The Assets: Infrastructure That Cannot Be Replicated

Within Wyoming, Campbell County is the energy capital — and its asset base tells the story directly. The Nature Conservancy built a tool called Brightfields Energy Siting Initiative (BESI) which maps the landscape for new energy development on “previously disturbed lands, or so-called ‘brownfields,’ basically recycling land.” 

The county’s infrastructure is organized around two development corridors. A northern cluster of Dry Fork, Eagle Butte, Rawhide, and Buckskin mines, all close to Gillette’s grid and workforce, and a southern cluster along the US-59 corridor including Belle Ayr, Caballo, Cordero Rojo, Coal Creek, and Black Thunder. Both corridors have BNSF rail access, WAPA high-voltage transmission at 500 and 230 kV, and road infrastructure already in place. Building on these already-disturbed mine lands preserves Wyoming’s extraordinary intact wildlife habitat, where the environmental case and the development case point in the same direction.

The specific assets are formidable:

•      Around 1,500 megawatts of installed generation capacity at Dry Fork Station, the Wyodak Plant, Neil Simpson Complex, and the Wygen units, already connected to WAPA transmission. The Dry Fork substation alone has interconnection capacity available for up to 300 megawatts of new generation today. That infrastructure took decades and billions to build. It cannot be quickly replicated anywhere.

•      Eleven active coal mines spanning more than 350,000 acres, with environmental baselines established, road networks built, water infrastructure in place, and rail running to multiple loadout points. The underlying geology of the Powder River Basin is near-ideal for permanent carbon sequestration, a durable competitive advantage for carbon-intensive industries seeking credible net-zero pathways.

•      Two pre-permitted, shovel-ready industrial sites at Coal Creek Industrial Site (1,500-plus acres) and Pronghorn Industrial Park (250-plus acres), where developers can begin work without the multi-year permitting processes that stall projects elsewhere. Wyoming’s legislature is going further still: the Joint Minerals, Business and Economic Development Interim Committee is actively pursuing exemptions to the industrial siting process for reusing mining sites for industrial and manufacturing purposes, a direct signal that the regulatory environment is being shaped to accelerate exactly this kind of development. Timeline compression is not a secondary benefit. It is a direct and measurable advantage to building.

•      A workforce built for this. Approximately 3,400 Campbell County residents work directly in coal mining, 16 percent of the total workforce, and Gillette’s community college is explicitly focused on industrial workforce development. Electricians, equipment operators, safety specialists, project managers. As BWXT’s senior director of advanced nuclear fuels said when pitching his company’s Gillette facility: “Y’all have the workforce, y’all have the manufacturing, y’all have the energy drive.” 

Energy Growth and Environmental Progress: Not a Trade-Off

Investing in Campbell County can shape a new pathway forward that channels economic diversification and growth for the community, strong environmental outcomes, and an attractive investment proposition: energy communities investing—basically impact investing in energy communities. The standard framing of impact investing and next-generation energy investment asks investors to accept a performance concession in exchange for doing good. Campbell County inverts that logic entirely. What reduces cost, compresses timeline, and improves returns in Campbell County, is also what produces better environmental outcomes than any greenfield alternative. The financial case and the environmental case are not in tension. They are the same case.

The assets that make Campbell County an exceptional next-generation energy location are the same assets that make it an exceptional financial opportunity. Reclaimed mine land eliminates greenfield acquisition and remediation costs. Pre-zoned industrial sites compress permitting timelines by years. Existing high-voltage transmission, plans for more, and state efforts to study advanced transmission technologies and electricity storage to meet the need for expanded transmission capacity in Wyoming from 2026 to 2046 demonstrate the ability to connect power to demand. A technically skilled workforce reduces construction risk and timeline uncertainty. Federal Energy Community designation stacks bonus credits on top of already-favorable economics.

As a result, the environmental benefit is a consequence of building projects and investing in an energy community like Campbell County, not a concession to it. The Jackson Hole Institute’s research suggests that investors entering this de-risked pipeline with permitting pre-cleared, incentives stacked, and timelines compressed can access returns meaningfully above comparable greenfield development, where execution risk and regulatory delay routinely erode projected returns. The community gets jobs, tax base, and economic diversification. The environment gets better outcomes than if development happened on undisturbed land somewhere else.

This is what a new approach to energy investment looks like in practice: community prosperity, environmental stewardship, and investor returns not as competing priorities to be traded off, but as reinforcing outcomes of the same well-structured deal. Campbell County is the ideal place to build it.

The Opportunity Is Now

Campbell County has powered America for more than a century, and the community’s appetite to lead in the next era is unambiguous. The infrastructure is here. The workforce is here. The regulatory environment is moving in the right direction. And the demand for what Campbell County can produce has never been greater.

Building the next energy build out in Campbell County and places like transcends any single project, because it shows how in this next U.S. chapter dependable energy can be built benefitting the communities that build it, meeting energy demand that underpins growing societies, and done in an environmentally responsible manner. These investments work financially precisely because they are built around the communities identity and goals. 

Across America there are dozens of places with the same factors at play - Appalachian coal towns, Gulf Coast refinery communities, Four Corners energy corridors, each with existing infrastructure, skilled workforces, and the will to build something new. What Campbell County proves, they can replicate. Achieving these goals could set a new example for what can come next for American energy communities as they continue to deliver energy to power America as they have for generations. 

Sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration; International Energy Agency, Energy and AI (2025); Black Hills Corp. SEC filings; Wyoming Energy Authority; Cowboy State Daily; Gillette News Record; County 17; Wyoming Public Media; The Nature Conservancy Wyoming; Wyoming Department of Workforce Services; Jackson Hole Institute research