Investment mogul Warren Buffett bought a huge tract of Powder River Basin coal properties.

Tycoon Phil Anschutz will spend billions to tap Wyoming's unharnessed wind resource.

International giant General Electric will build a coal-gasification research center in Wyoming.

There have been a number of "big ideas" floated in recent years about how to harness Wyoming's vast potential for energy, but almost no bricks and mortar as a result. This edition of the Wyoming Energy Journal is an inventory of some of the most significant big energy proposals in recent years and the players behind them.

Some of the technologies that these big thinkers consider were first tried years ago - sometimes decades ago - but somehow never really took hold here to shove Wyoming out of its upstream eddy of only extracting raw resources for export. Yet a consistent frequency of press releases and announcements touting big energy plans seems to sustain a sense that Wyoming is on the cusp of launching the world into a clean energy future.

These are "big ideas" because they attempt to address challenges of such scale they are difficult to imagine. Today, some 305 million people in America are plugging iPods and big-screen TVs into a fleet of coal-fired and nuclear power plants mostly designed and built in the 1960s and 1970s. Energy experts say that not only is a massive retrofit overdue, but the fleet must be expanded.

Considering the confluence of global warming and a rapidly expanding global population, it will take a lot of big ideas to ensure a decent standard of living for future generations. Big Wyoming can play a part.

- Dustin Bleizeffer, Star-Tribune