This piece from TWW’s Greg Brophy was first published by the Sterling Journal Advocate on August 28, 2026 and can be accessed here.
Opinion: A new wave of energy and tech investment is coming to rural Colorado. We know how to make it work for us
By GREG BROPHY
August 28, 2026 at 2:36 PM MDT
The county commission meeting was standing room only. A transmission line was on the agenda— or maybe a battery storage project, or a data center scouting its first rural site. The public comment period filled up fast: a handful of regulars with prepared remarks, a few landowners who drove 45 minutes each way and sat in silence, and that familiar face who shows up to every hearing regardless of what’s on the agenda.
When the meeting ended, the opponents with the loudest voices dominated the next week’s paper. But then, through days and weeks of quiet discussions between family, friends and neighbors, the community let their true wishes be known – and their elected officials carried those wishes out.
This is how rural Colorado has greeted every major economic expansion for the past 50 years. And the communities that leaned into the opportunity — not blindly, but thoughtfully — are the ones that reaped the benefits.
This history is worth remembering as rural communities weigh the pros and cons of new data centers and energy infrastructure.
Start with Weld County and the rest of the Denver-Julesburg Basin in northeast Colorado. In the early 2010s, the expansion of oil and gas production due to directional drilling and fracking didn’t arrive quietly. It arrived with truck traffic, pipeline easements, and plenty of commission meetings that looked a lot like the ones happening today.
The concerns were real. So were the results. Colorado’s oil and gas sector now supports more than 300,000 jobs and roughly $48 billion in annual economic activity. And at the local level, investment in the DJ Basin also revived the tax base — generating more revenue for schools, roads, sheriff’s departments, hospitals and other essential services.
Going back further, in the 1990s, large-scale hog operations moved into Yuma, Phillips, and Sedgwick counties. The opposition was fierce — “corporate swine” fights in the legislature, hostile newspaper editorials, and county commissioner races that got personal.
The concerns weren’t invented. Odor is real. Water is real. So is the question of whether outside capital respects the local community.
But here’s what happened: the hog barns came, population stabilized, school enrollment held, and an agricultural economy that had lived and died on wheat and cattle prices found a third leg. Decades later, the loudest voices from those public hearings don’t represent where those communities landed. They represent a moment that passed.
Wind energy has followed the same arc over the past 20 years. Eastern Plains farmers and ranchers who signed lease agreements with wind developers weren’t selling out — they were adding a new source of income that didn’t stop the production of crops or cattle underneath the turbines.
The tax base for school districts in Kit Carson and Cheyenne counties grew. Then the transmission fights came, and they sounded familiar: viewsheds, property values, “who benefits?” The counties that said yes are collecting lease and tax revenue. The ones that said no are watching turbines and economic growth go up in communities that said yes.
Now comes the next wave. High-voltage transmission. Utility-scale battery storage. Geothermal. Data centers scouting rural sites precisely because they need land and power that Front Range counties can no longer offer at any price. This is a once-in-a-generation convergence — and unlike drought, commodity cycles, or federal policy, it’s one rural Colorado actually gets to shape.
The legitimate concerns deserve real answers. Sound and viewsheds matter. So does truck traffic during construction, and water use, and whether project developers show up with lawyers or with open hearts and ears to hear.
These are conditions to negotiate and enforce. What they are not is a reason for blanket refusal. The difference between “raise your concerns and get them addressed” and “veto the project” is the difference between landing new investment in your community or watching that investment take I-70 to Kansas or I-76 to Nebraska.
My mentor used to say to me, “when they are passing pie, you better grab a piece. There is no guarantee it will come back around.”
There’s a dynamic at these county-level meetings worth calling out. A handful of organized opponents fill the public comment period and get treated as the voice of the community. But the landowner with a lease payment, the school board member counting new assessed value, and the young family that would rather stay in Yuma County than move to Fort Collins — they’re not in the room.
They’re not in the room because they have busy lives and they hope their elected representatives will look out for their interests. Local leaders owe it to that silent majority to weigh the full ledger, not just the loudest voices in the room.
Rural communities that said yes — to gas wells, to hog barns, to wind farms, to the grid — are the ones still here, still growing, still able to keep their kids in the county.
Saying no doesn’t preserve rural Colorado. It just hands the opportunity to some other rural county, maybe another state.
Greg Brophy is a farmer and former state senator. He is the Colorado Director of The Western Way.