On the Kansas Energy Front, It's War by Proxy
by Jack Cashill
In Kansas, two opposing forces are doing battle over the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard. But it’s hard to tell who’s who when few fly their true colors—and when fewer still reveal their true motives.
Two bills in Topeka, Senate Bill 82 and House Bill 2241, temporarily put renewable-energy forces on the defensive this year. Although the House moved forward—however hesitantly—toward modifying the standard, the Senate effectively killed consideration of its own version of the changes on Feb. 28. It’s likely that the matter is dead for the balance of this legislative session.
But the issue isn’t going away, and chances are good that lawmakers will revisit it in the 2014 session. If passed into law, those bills would have weakened the provisions of the Renewable Energy Standards Act. That 2009 legislation required the state to pull 20 percent of its power from renewable resources like wind and solar by 2020. If these standards seem a tad green and un-Kansas like, it is because they were passed under duress.
In 2007, the Sunflower Electric Power Cooperative proposed adding two 700-megawatt generating units to its existing 360-megawatt plant in Holcomb. This was the best economic news in western Kansas since groundwater irrigation.
Unfortunately, Kathleen Sebelius had her eye on higher office. To raise her stock nationally, the governor sacrificed the plant to her party’s mania over “climate change”—the crisis formerly known as “global warming”—and changed to accommodate global cooling and other bumps in the weather.
To maintain her viability locally, Sebelius worked through a proxy, namely secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, Rod Bremby. The media celebrated Bremby as the first state bureaucrat to block a coal-fired plant “based on its effect on climate change” and played along with the charade that it was his decision. For her part, Sebelius vetoed repeated Republican efforts to override that decision.
When Sebelius left Kansas in 2009 to assume, yes, higher office, her successor, nouveau Democrat Mark Parkinson, tapped his inner Republican and brokered a compromise. Sunflower got its plant expansion, at least some of it, and the state got its Renewable Portfolio Standard.
Compromising with the greens over Sunflower, however, was like compromising with Josef Stalin over Eastern Europe. Lawyers from a Luddite legal outfit out of San Francisco with the scary name “Earthjustice” promptly made hash out of the compromise by suing Sunflower and stalling the expansion.
Ignoring the climate-change hysteria, Earthjustice lawyers now claimed the expanded plant would emit “massive amounts of air pollutants” on “downwind Kansans.” I cannot imagine that Earthjustice, a proxy for the Sierra Club, consulted with the downwinders. These folks knew the Sunflower jobs were real and the pollutants, even if legit, were not in the same league as a pig farm’s.
Sierra Club and Earthjustice insisted that “Kansas can enjoy a robust, clean economy by turning to its abundant wind energy resources.” To be sure, the state has no shortage of wind and not just in Topeka. By some standards, it has more usable wind than any state in America.
Division in the Ranks
It would be a mistake, however, to think that there is anything pure about harnessing that energy. Wind turbines that are 400 feet high and weigh 600,000 pounds make an industrial-strength impact. Installing one is like building a factory, a factory that runs constantly, hums obnoxiously and casts stroke-inducing shadows that can be seen for miles. They are even tougher on birds, as the well-deserved sobriquet “Condor Cuisinart” might suggest.
After seeing Windfall, a fair-minded documentary on the subject, film critic Roger Ebert trashed wind turbines as “a blight upon the land and yet another device by which energy corporations and Wall Street, led by the always reliable Goldman Sachs, are picking the pockets of those who can least afford it.” And Ebert, like most of those who opposed the turbines in film, is a dogged liberal.
In Kansas, wind is big business, but of the sort, alas, that makes crony capitalists out of all who participate. Unlike the coal people who mostly want to be left alone, wind people need the state to create an artificial market and they need high-powered energy attorneys to convince the state of the same.
In mid-February, attorneys from Polsinelli Shughart made a major pitch for wind to the Kansas House Standing Committee on Energy and Environment. I may be wrong, but I don’t think it was love of the Earth that inspired them.
Since it would defeat their purposes to say that only state intervention could make wind marketable, the Polsinelli lawyers argued instead that repealing RPS would send a “clear negative message… to those companies that include sustainability as a factor in site selection.”
This suggests that companies prefer the ideological comfort of subsidized sustainability over the real benefits of low energy costs. Some may. Greens have a knack for instilling fear in companies that use energy, and even more in those that produce it.
In pitching the state, Polsinelli partnered with its own proxy, the Kansas Energy Information Network. Despite its overblown name, KEIN appears to be a one-man show. The “one-man” is a guy named Scott White, who, according to the proposal, founded KEIN with a state grant in 2001.
While maintaining his leadership role at KEIN, White also managed to work in the private wind industry business, first with juwi Wind, a major player out of Germany, and then with a wholly owned offshoot called JW Prairie Wind Power, based in Lawrence. I am not about to question White’s motives. I have always thought making money a good one. I would just hate to have to subsidize his ambitions.
For Scott Schwab, a Johnson County Republican on the Energy and Environment Committee, eliminating the RPS should be a no-brainer. A believer in free markets, he has little use for mandates. What troubles him is that the anti-RPS forces, perhaps out of fear, are fighting through proxies as nebulous as the Kansas Energy Information Network.
“There is a silent war going on between wind energy and some anonymous forces who don’t want wind,” says Schwab. Like others on his committee, he kind of wishes the players on either side would put their real names on their jerseys. 
Jack Cashill is Ingram's Executive Editor and has been affiliated with the magazine for 28 years. He can be reached at jackcashill@yahoo.com. The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's Magazine.