Activists in Utah and Wyoming held rallies this week urging state regulators to scrutinize a document they believe will raise energy bills for hundreds of thousands of Westerners, and worsen air pollution across the northern Rockies.

The subject of the gatherings was Rocky Mountain Power’s 2025 integrated resource plan, a roadmap for electricity generation and transmission from the largest utility in both states, and a subsidiary of PacifiCorp, which is owned by billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. This year’s integrated resource plan, which is updated every two years, forecasted slowing investments in wind and solar power and battery storage—increasingly inexpensive ways of delivering electricity without producing greenhouse gas emissions.

Residents and environmentalists in both states, where fossil fuel production helps keep residential tax burdens low, have objected to these plans, arguing that failing to invest in renewables—especially before Republican cuts to clean energy tax credits kick in next year—will make energy bills unnecessarily expensive. 

“We are being sold a monster,” said Luis Miranda, a senior campaign organizer with the Sierra Club, ahead of a rally in Salt Lake City. “We hope this kind of pressure brings a bit of accountability or sense of responsibility from PacifiCorp.”

David Eskelsen, a spokesperson for PacifiCorp, said the company “does not usually comment on the content of statements made in public witness hearings.” In testimony filed with its regulator in Utah, the Public Service Commission, PacifiCorp disputed the need to build tax-advantaged renewable energy as it had already planned for fossil fuel resources to stay online in Utah.

At a hearing in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Utah public service commissioners responsible for deciding whether to accept the document heard comments from 15 members of the public, none of whom supported PacifiCorp’s plan. Some testified in the spirit of Halloween. 

“My name is Dr. Frankenstein,” one costumed commenter said, reimagining the character as a “Pacifi-Corpse” executive. “My 2025 IRP creation is a monster. … You do have the power to stop this IRP before it grows stronger. You could tell Pacifi-Corpse to go back to the lab and to build something clean and affordable.”

“I can’t resist the temptation to wish you a happy Halloween,” David Clark, a commissioner, responded.

Other critiques were less abstract. Tilden Warner, a college student who attended the meeting on crutches and in a walking boot for a broken leg, testified that he is worried PacifiCorp’s plan, with its continued reliance on coal and other fossil fuels, will contribute to increased environmental degradation in Utah. He lamented the ongoing loss of islands in the Great Salt Lake, which are becoming connected to the lakeshore as water evaporates.

“By the time I have kids and they are born here and they grow up, there may be no lake at all,” he said.

Emma Verhamme, a pregnant woman living in Salt Lake, spoke about how she mourns the world her daughter will be born into. Air pollution, climate volatility and higher energy costs all weighed on her.

“I know that I’m not giving her the same world that I was born into,” she said of her daughter’s future. “I can’t put clean air and reliable and affordable energy on my baby shower registry. That’s why I’m here asking you, Public Service Commission, to represent the needs and wants of the people and reject Rocky Mountain Power’s disappointing and seemingly self-serving integrated resource plan.”

If the Utah Public Service Commission accepts the plan instead, the utility could use it as evidence that the commission supported the proposal when applying for rate adjustments associated with it in the future. While PacifiCorp can still pursue the plan if it is not acknowledged, it would be more difficult to claim any costs associated with the plan are prudent, the Sierra Club’s Miranda said.

“I think the community is hopeful because of how the Public Service Commission has reacted over the past year and a half,” Miranda said. “They have been very reasonable and fair, and frankly outstanding.”

A Sierra Club gathering in Laramie, Wyoming, kicked off just a few minutes after the hearing in Salt Lake City ended. Recent Rocky Mountain Power rate hikes in the Cowboy State have been the subject of intense political scrutiny ever since 2023, when the utility applied for a near-30 percent increase. Residents expressed hope Wednesday that their Public Service Commission would soon hold a hearing on Rocky Mountain Power’s integrated resource plan, and how it might affect what they pay for electricity.

John Burbridge, secretary and chief counsel for the Wyoming Public Service Commission, told Inside Climate News there would be a hearing, but it had not yet been scheduled. Burbridge did not comment on the rally in Laramie.

“What Rocky Mountain Power invests in in this [plan] is ultimately going to affect your rates,” said Emma Jones, a community organizer with the Sierra Club in Wyoming, during that event. “The Public Service Commission needs to hear more from people like you.”

Affordability was at the center of the rally’s proceedings. “I’m concerned about the future,” said Madeline Dalrymple, a Laramie resident. The current plan “will increase our cost of living and make Wyoming more expensive.”

Both federal and private-sector estimates have shown wind and solar energy projects, and battery systems to store their electricity, are cheaper to build than natural gas and coal power plants. 

“We see a plan that is trying to hold on to a world that just doesn’t exist anymore,” said Tanner Ewalt, another Laramie resident. “The market itself is determining that coal and oil aren’t the future.”

Elsewhere in the West, other groups are concerned by what they describe as a regional fracturing of PacifiCorp’s system, which stretches across six Western states. Fred Heutte, a senior policy associate with NW Energy Coalition, said he was surprised to see the company propose confining some of the costs on its system to specific regions. 

He and Miranda are concerned that a more localized grid will lead to higher costs for consumers. If PacifiCorp built renewables in Oregon and Washington, Utahns and Wyomingites would miss out on that more affordable energy without a suitable transmission connection to bring that energy from west to east—which Heutte said PacifiCorp claims is the case. And Oregonians and Washingtonians, whose states have clean energy mandates, may disproportionately shoulder the capital costs of building new renewable energy operations that should benefit the whole system. 

“The reality is, it is a single system, and the new resources that provide the most customer value, wherever they are, are the ones that should be developed,” Heutte said.

My rubber boots squelched as I grabbed another 5-gallon bucket full of mud from a Wyoming Game and Fish Department herpetology technician. We performed an awkward handoff before I dumped the mud on the ground in front of my sinking boots. The squelching continued as I used my boots to mash the fresh mud up against willow branches woven among 4-inch-wide posts rammed in a streambed. 

Our little team, the herpetology technician, a Trout Unlimited project manager and another volunteer like me, were finishing up the first in a series of nearly a dozen fake beaver dams on a creek on the west side of the Snowy Range Mountains in southeast Wyoming. They’re technically called beaver dam analogues — since with their complex patterns of sticks and mud, they’re supposed to imitate real beaver dams. Although I’m not sure my noisy rubber boots really compare to the efficacy of the beaver tail.

The dams’ purpose, as the name implies, is to slow streamflow, lightly flooding banks and providing the water more time to seep into the ground. 

If we’re lucky, a family of beavers will come along and make this analogue their home, even tearing out our handiwork to construct something they like better that’s more permanent and sturdier. Beavers are, after all, professional furry engineers, who perfected their craft over millennia. 

Our fake beaver dams aren’t meant to last forever. They’ll be maintained annually for about five years (unless real beavers take over earlier), but the result when established in the right place can be remarkable, restoring and rejuvenating wetlands, replenishing the water table, keeping water higher up in systems longer in the year, and providing habitat for everything from insects, frogs and toads to elk and moose, and yes, even beavers. 

Stream restoration experts like Steve Gale, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s aquatic habitat biologist, can and do extoll the benefits of beavers and beaver dams. And while the rest of us standing in the stream bed see their utility, we also agreed with Gale when he said: “Who doesn’t want to play in the water with mud and sticks?”

Bigger than just beavers

Before European settlers streamed onto this continent, bringing an insatiable demand for beaver pelts, the rodents lived in streams, creeks and rivers almost everywhere. They dammed any flowing water they could find and had a hand in shaping large swaths of the nation. 

While beavers can be a nuisance, falling ancient cottonwoods in parched areas and flooding creeks and irrigation ditches, they’re also one of the best examples of ecosystem engineers, Gale said, and their services have been missed. Without beavers and beaver dams, rivers run faster and cut down into the soil, they wash away sediment and move water faster from headwater states like Wyoming to other states downstream. 

Biologists have tried reintroducing beavers across the country — the Army Corps of Engineers even famously airdropped beavers into an Idaho wilderness area — with mixed success. 

So now watershed managers are turning to contraptions like the ones a team of nearly 20, including Game and Fish employees and volunteers from all over the state, helped build in mid-September. 

We stood on the banks of the South Fork of Lake Creek in the Pennock Wildlife Habitat Management Area and listened to Gale walk us through the process. In the last few decades, the South Fork of Lake Creek had cut deeper and deeper into the earth, ultimately sinking lower than the floodplain and as a result offering little water to surrounding vegetation. When runoff hit each spring, the water rushed down as plants sat parched on the banks. 

“We lost riparian habitat and riparian width, which is important for calving areas,” he said. “We’re doing this work primarily for the deer, elk and moose.”

Beavers had been reintroduced here before, but even the industrious rodents had a hard time building dams and ponds deep enough to keep them alive and safe through winter. 

We were here to help, hopefully. We would spend the bulk of the day pounding posts made from trees across the width of the creek over a quarter-mile-long stretch and then weaving bendy willow branches through the posts. After building a wall of willows, we would use buckets of mud and sod to fill in the cracks. With any luck, water would begin backing up almost immediately, eventually filling and slowly trickling over the tops. 

Life or death

As beaver dam analogues become increasingly popular, biologists with state agencies and nonprofits are teaming up to place them in streams across the landscape. 

Austin Quynn, the Trout Unlimited project manager helping direct our team, worked with groups of youth corps members over the last couple summers building, maintaining and repairing hundreds of analogues on a stream called Muddy Creek southwest of Rawlins to help habitat for four native fish species: flannelmouth and bluehead suckers, roundtail chubs and Colorado River cutthroat. Last summer, beavers came from miles downstream and tore out dozens of analogues in one stretch. He sounded amused that his work was destroyed, because in its place, they’d built a massive dam that must have been what the beavers wanted and needed. 

Some of the dams blew out from spring runoff, scouring the creek bed of sediment and leaving behind gravel that cutthroat trout could use for spawning. 

Deep pools created by the analogues — and eventually beavers themselves — also offer fish refuge from the heat on mid-summer days. 

On the east side of the Snowy Range, Wendy Estes-Zumpf, Game and Fish’s herpetological coordinator, and others built eight analogues in a creek which contains one of the last boreal toad populations in southeast Wyoming. It had been a stronghold for the creatures, but in the absence of beavers, the creek became incised, leaving little wetland habitat for toads to breed and survive.

A few seasons after Estes-Zumpf’s team erected the fake beaver dams, boreal toad populations have started to come back. She counted as few as four toads on past spring surveys and found almost 30 this spring including multiple age classes. 

Beaver dam analogues aren’t a silver bullet for a drought-stricken West, Gale said, but for some species and some creeks, they could be the difference between life and death. 

Plus, it’s hard to beat a day playing in the mud.