Steve Isirk is a dairy farmer, a former county commissioner in western Kansas — and a big supporter of renewable energy and wind farms.
Near Garden City, he says, most landowners embrace the idea that utilities will pay thousands of dollars a year to place wind turbines on their properties. The towers “take up only a small piece of property, and all you have to do is go down to the mail office and pick up your check. It’s kind of like a mini oil well.”
Without the pollution that oil wells cause.
The future of producing electricity in the Heartland is blowing in the wind. A growing coalition of utilities, landowners and businesses is hard at work promoting and building more wind farms in Kansas and Missouri.
And for good reasons. Investing in this form of renewable energy creates:
- Jobs, including some at Kansas City-based engineering companies.
- Power with a no-cost energy source, the wind.
- No pollution, which helps reduce or eliminate the cost differential of electricity produced by wind power vs. dirty coal-fired plants that harm human health and help cause global warming.
- A valuable export to other states.
To be clear, residents of Kansas and Missouri will continue to rely on coal-fired plants to produce the majority of their electricity for many years to come. But that does not mean unfettered construction of new coal plants — especially the huge, pollution-belching expansion supported by the Kansas Legislature in the western part of the state. That plan should be killed.
Meanwhile, work should proceed to dramatically boost the amount of electricity produced by wind. How can that happen?
First, Congress should pass a national renewable electricity standard. A government mandate would encourage private investment and confidence in a more stable future for renewable electric power.
Second, states and utilities must work together to significantly improve the nation’s transmission grid.
The electricity standard received a big boost recently when President Barack Obama called for 25 percent of the nation’s electricity to come from renewable sources by 2025.
A federal mandate could include increased public subsidies for wind and solar power, which would encourage investment in those sources.
That would be a positive move — provided aid is kept to a reasonable level.
A national standard also should spur more jobs in wind-rich states such as Kansas, while it further diversifies the production of energy around the country. Less reliance on heavily polluting coal is necessary.
As for an upgraded transmission grid, it would help move wind power from rural areas — such as the prairies of Kansas and the hinterlands of Texas — to other parts of the United States.
An enhanced grid would cost billions of dollars, and that price has been tough to overcome. Currently, large investments in the so-called “green power superhighway” are stifled by battles among states and utilities over how to pay for new, high-voltage lines.
One responsible plan backed by the Wind Energy Association is for federal regulators to develop a fair way to spread construction costs to ratepayers of all utilities that would benefit from the new lines.
Even if the national renewable electricity standard takes effect and transmission lines are improved, states such as Kansas will have to fiercely compete to woo utility investments to produce electricity with more wind farms.
“Wind is a mainstream technology today,” says Julie Clendenin of the American Wind Energy Association. While that is certainly correct, this nation still must be more aggressive as it taps into a clean and growing source of energy.
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