Environmentalists Prevent Cleaner Power Plant Construction
In 2007, Sunflower Electric Power Corporation proposed a state-of-the-art coal-fired power plant in Holcomb, Kansas. This plant represented a $3.5 billion investment in one of the most rural areas of the country, $78 million in annual payroll during the construction phase, and more than 300 permanent jobs and $15 million in payroll once it was completed.
The plant, with two 700-megawatt generators, would have used technology to limit emissions. It would have been a huge economic boon to an area which largely relies on the meatpacking industry, tourism, and agriculture for jobs.
Then a bureaucrat on the other end of the state killed it. “A lot of people would be at work right now if they hadn’t shot it down,” Sunflower spokeswoman Cindy Hertl said.
The first nail in the coffin of the plant was the denial of an air quality permit by Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) Secretary Roderick L. Bremby. KDHE is sort of the EPA and U.S. Health Department all rolled into one. In denying the permit, Bremby said: “After careful consideration of my responsibility to protect the public health and environment from actual, threatened or potential harm from air pollution, I have decided to deny the Sunflower Electric Power Corporation application for an air quality permit.”
This was, keep in mind, before the U.S. Supreme Court issued that insane ruling that carbon dioxide could be regulated as a pollutant. [See correction below -- Ed.]
So, on the basis there might be a problem, Bremby axed the plant. Four bills and four vetoes later, then-Gov. Kathleen Sebelius left office to become secretary of health and human services.
It was so bad the Finney County Democratic Party Chair Lon Wartman left the party and issued a scathing rebuke to Sebelius.
Enter current Gov. Mark Parkinson.
A compromise was reached which would allow Sunflower to construct a plant with a single 895 mw generator. While this is to some degree a win, it’s now three years since the original proposal was laid down. This smaller plant will inject fewer jobs and less money into the state economy, and ground won’t even be broken if they can’t get the clean air permit they need to start construction (Bremby is still at KDHE). If the permit is issued, and that’s a big if, there’s still months of public comment and hearings needed before the first spadeful of dirt can be turned.
Presumably, when — barring something insane happening in November — Sen. Sam Brownback becomes governor, there will be a new KDHE secretary and the permit will be issued.
All those facts and figures describing how safe and clean coal would be at the new plant is really first class reporting and gives us a real basis to defend the coal plant in our dinner conversations!; Thanks!
I honestly have to question whether the negative consequences of “Silent Spring” were “unintended” on the environmentalists’ part. Anything which reduces the number of humans (pestilence!) on Holy Mother Gaia seems to be entirely OK with them. As long as they aren’t part of the “cull”, that is.
clear ether
eon
Here in California the Marxist/Nazi Environmentalists are one of the main reasons that the economy is in shambles. At every turn they erect regulatory roadblocks to business, energy, new construction, and impose ruinous rules and fees without ever being subject to approval by either the legislature or the voters. They are one of the driving forces of the effort to have government control every aspect of our daily lives and destroy our standard of living. Literally the enviromentalists are the enemy within our society. They do not care one whit about the well being of the citizens of this state or our country.
In order to save the country a major pushback must occur to dismantle the dictatorial empire of control that has been erected at all levels of government. America’s recovery and rise cannot take place without a swift and ruthless pruning of these totalitarians from our government.
Don’t feel too lonely – here in Washington we are hot on the heels of California – trying to catch up with your wonderful Nanny State. Our state government apparently is attempting to emulate California in every way. We’ve even gone to the extreme length to adopt your CARB laws nearly verbatim.
We’ve also passed a flurry of tax increases – in a recession year. Apparently the Democrats feel safe even in an election year.
We shall see.
I had the pleasure of engaging with a GreenPeace activist some years ago. He was going door to door soliciting donations. I nearly had him in tears after five minutes because he couldn’t answer any of my questions without mindlessly parroting some talking point that usually had nothing to do with the question.
The problem with common sense is that it’s becoming less and less common.
The first nail in the coffin of the plant was the denial of an air quality permit by Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) Secretary Roderick L. Bremby.
Are you sure that due to his bankruptcy etc at that same time he wasn’t feeling up to charges of being frivolous with taxpayer interests? He was being smacked from both sides… you might be feeling a bit sensitive as well. The DHE Sec only pulls in maybe $100k I think. This falls in the category of “they don’t pay me enough to take this crap.”
There’s more to this than just the enviro-nazi angle.
I would offer two comments:
First, the blog states: “This [Bremby's denial of air quality permits] was, keep in mind, before the U.S. Supreme Court issued that insane ruling that carbon dioxide could be regulated as a pollutant.” That is simply not factual. In fact, Bremby based his denial in part upon the U.S Supreme Court decision requiring EPA to regulate CO2 as a pollutant under the federal Clean Air Act.
Second: The previous comment by G.L. Alston is correct in principle. There is more to this than just the enviro-nazi angle. There are so many reasons the Sunflower proposed project is a bad idea it’s hard to count them all. Not least among them, Sunflower owes its existence and its existing coal-fired plant to American taxpayer dollars. It took out hundreds of millions of dollars in loans courtesy of American taxpayers, and then got the feds to forgive all that taxpayer debt – making it a gift from taxpayers. And this is the company that wants to build several more coal-fired plants it doesn’t need. See more at: http://www.gpace.org/?p=1395
GPACE doesn’t seem too interested in showing their financials and who donates how much to their cause. Smells a bit like a repackaging of Envirowhacko ideology form their web site.
You wouldn’t have a link to their financial disclosures, as required by law, would you?
For reference or confirmation:
Here’s a link to the original KDHE statement regarding the permit denials – released October 18, 2007: http://www.kdheks.gov/news/web_archives/2007/10182007a.htm
Here’s the U.S. Supreme Court decision – released April 2, 2007: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/pdf/05-1120P.ZO
So Bremby is on the bandwagon that CO2 is a pollutant? Color me surprised. Anyone using that USSC decision to back up their claim of “saving the earth” has so much BS shoved into themselves that not only are their eyes brown, but it’s spurting out of their ears.
If Bremby was serious about curbing CO2 as a pollutant, why isn’t he shutting down plants across campus for expelling too much CO2 and banning the use of power generated by sources that generate too much CO2?
I smells me a political agenda with no basis in fact.
Let’s get some units right here (yes, math is important!)
“Kansas currently generates more than a gigawatt of electricity via wind power”
This is incorrect. Wind might be CAPABLE of generating more than a gigawatt, and might, on rare occasions, do so. Yet, averaged out over a year, wind (on the national average) will only produce 25% of what it is capable of. That 25% figure is called the “capacity factor.”
In units of salable electricity (what you pay for), that’s about 2,200 gigawatt-hours a year or about $110 million a year at a wholesale rate of $50 per megawatt-hour.
A comparable new nuclear unit, at 1.1 gigawatt, will have a 90% capacity factor. It would then sell $394 million a year at wholesale.
A coal plant typically has a slightly lower capacity factor than a nuclear plant. This is mainly due to the wear-and-tear of moving millions of tons of coal into the furnace and thousands of tons of ash out.
I’m not anti-coal – I just think nuclear is cleaner and a better deal all-around although coal can be cheaper if the plant is convenient to low cost coal resources. we’ll continue to need both.
Not only is the capacity factor for wind only 25%, but even worse, there is no way to predict when that 25% will be available. Wind power can cut in and cut out on a few minutes notice.
With the exception of hydroelectric, you can’t ramp up or down other types of power plants that quickly. (With many hydroelectric plants you have to sound a siren a half hour to an hour before starting up the plant. This is to give people who may be fishing or just playing in the water, a chance to get out of the way before the river starts rising.)
The result is that other plants have to be kept running, so that they can be switched in when the wind stops blowing. (A similar issue exists with solar, in that clouds can cause an unexpected drop in power production. At least the sun sets and rises at known times.)
The result of this is that wind power saves very little actual energy.
Given the huge amounts of energy needed to build wind turbines, it’s not a sure thing that a turbin will produce enough energy over it’s life span to pay back what it took to build the thing in the first place.
(A similar problem exists with solar as well.
I will take the spanking for being incorrect on the order of events on the SCOTUS decision and the air quality permit denial by Bremby. However, the reality is, Bremby denied the permits based on a potential threat, which no one can conclusively say exists. And the governor repeatedly vetoed bills introduced to issue the permits based not on what was good for the people of Southwest Kansas, but on what was good for her political future.
So far as what may have been going on in Bremby’s personal life at the time, how is this relevant? I have a lot of things going on in my personal life on any given day, but it stays at home. If Bremby allowed personal problems to affect his decision, then he is even more incompetent than the majority of Kansans already believe him to be and he should resign.
The reality is, this is not about coal, or wind or any other particular method of generating electricity. This is about the ability of the radical green movement to exert power.
Whitehall, I’m actually with you, wind is a horribly inefficient and ineffective generating method. Nuclear is the way to go.
#10 Patrick Richardson — Whitehall, I’m actually with you, wind is a horribly inefficient and ineffective generating method. Nuclear is the way to go.
Everyone who posts at PJM agrees with this as far as I know.
MarkTheGreat — Given the huge amounts of energy needed to build wind turbines, it’s not a sure thing that a turbin will produce enough energy over it’s life span to pay back what it took to build the thing in the first place.
Good point.
When you factor in the creation of alloys and acquisition of the rare earths etc needed to make the electrical generation components, the end to end budget is CLEARLY more than the fool thing can generate. And this is after 30 years of design effort. There’s also 30 years of subsidy to account for. Does anyone have any sort of per unit guess regarding the amount of subsidy this “industry” has chewed through vs installed and “operational” units? I’m guessing it’s enough that the end to end budget is more like a multiple (3x perhaps?)
This event is almost word for word a transcription of events near Farmington, NM, a couple of years ago. Native land involved, permits, everything. All denied, killed a lot of tribal jobs. Completely unused land that even the tourists ignore.
It is worse than that. The Navajo site had received their permits from the Bush EPA. The permit was then canceled by the Obama EPA.
I would like to point out how rabidly hysterical these environmentalists are. Check out the LaBrea tar pits right there on the left coast. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Brea_Tar_Pits
Look at all that bubbling CO2 and nasty oil coming out of the ground. Oh, the humanity!!
Oil does come right out of the earth, seeps up from the ocean floor right into the ocean. It also apparently seeps out of the ground. So I have to laugh when I see environazis literally breaking into tears about an oil spill when there are tar pits that are enshrined as a wonderful part of our natural history. When will they realize that in the big picture, we are all just exhibits in the museum of natural history? We might destroy ourselves but this planet will chew us up and spit us out without a moment’s notice and without even a hiccup. So stop acting like you’re trying to save our planet. The mixture of self-loathing, arrogance, and ignorance demonstrated by some of these people is downright scary.
With regards to the Gulf leak, it is tragic to us at this moment in time. But the planet will survive – it always has. If we can clean it up, great, but the planet doesn’t really care one way or the other. We just moved some of her oil around a little bit. Besides, if we don’t drill it here, we will just import it, pay taxes on it, and have it shipped in a tanker all the way across an ocean or two. Until one of these geniuses has any actual ideas about how to harness some clean, naturally-occurring form of energy, I’ll take my chances with a domestic oil rig providing American jobs and keeping our dollars here at home.
Drill Baby Drill is a stupid thing to chant and does nothing to further the argument. But it does not detract from the reality that if we don’t drill it here it will just get drilled for by China and anyone else somewhere else in the world and then imported here at a higher price. Liberals might like to pay higher prices for no other reason than to alleviate some sort of self-centered guilt trip, but my conscience is clear and I should not have to be dragged into their strange world of self-flagellation. Obama knows well that opening up drilling will finally create some jobs around here, so I bet behind closed doors he laments the oil spill more for political reasons than for the mess that the bumpkins and clingers in the Florida panhandle will have to live with.
This is sorta like the way the hardcore anti-tobacoo crowd (with whom these bozos overlap) screams about secondhand smoke but blocked the tbacco companies from selling the new cigarette design with the substantially reduced sidestream smoke, with a shrill “There’s no such thing as a safe cigarette!”.
Yet these same people are for shoveling out the free condoms and syringes in the name of ‘harm reduction’.
Now you get it, “harm reduction” is exactly it. The greens won’t allow you to mitigate harm, there must be NO harm. And therefore nothing can be done.
Not true: they love iPads or anything from Apple.
Not true: they love iPads or anything from Apple.
The sad thing is….like with Al Gore and all his cronies…it’s really about distribution of wealth. It’s not the greedy oil/coal mongers of the world it’s the greedy environmentalists…soon they will be too big to fail…just thinking
Great article. The state does need money. For some strange reason, they are giving tens of millions to subsidize construction of plants to make parts for wind turbines. Now they are spending millions on gathering grids for wind power. When it gets hot in august and the wind stops, the back up source not only doubles the cost of wind, it cranks out CO2.
If Bremby has personal problems, he can of course step down.
It takes several tons of coal to make a ton of steel. A tower weighs 200 tons. The CO2 and coal related to wind power is enormous. The state made progress when Gove Sebelious gave up mid term and left a monster deficit and took on the HHS job. She had to clear up some tax cheat issues and was given the green light.
The Democrats all claim they ant to invite businesses and factories to their states. The taxes and rip off high rates of electricity are business repellents. Kansas does have plenty of water to sustain population growth and industrial needs.
from seven- “Kansas does have plenty of water to sustain population growth and industrial needs”. Please tell me why the Arkansas river out by Holcomb is a dry bed? I know why because Colorado has been sucking up that water before it can get to ks.
As to the pollution the plant will have state of the art filters to scrub out all bad pollutants. Be advised that all power plants are made to be able to divert these filters. Just an fyi don’t believe me go build one an you will be enlightened