Ener­gy pol­i­cy is one of those nerdy things that no one pays atten­tion to until it starts to go wrong. And that’s where we stand today. 

Elec­tric­i­ty demand con­tin­ues to rise, as doc­u­ment­ed by this report by the Ener­gy Infor­ma­tion Admin­is­tra­tion. And most of that elec­tric­i­ty is gen­er­at­ed by coal plants. This is bad, because burn­ing coal caus­es cli­mate change. Burn­ing coal releas­es more pol­lu­tants than oth­er fos­sil fuels, as well. 

The advan­tage of coal is that the Unit­ed States has a lot of it. We are, as peo­ple like to say, the Sau­di Ara­bia of coal. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, min­ing that coal is often dis­as­trous for the local envi­ron­ment, and most of what remains unmined is the dirt­i­est sort of coal. Mod­ern coal plants have all sorts of scrub­bers and fil­ters, but that pol­lu­tion still has to go somewhere.
Which is why I’m sad to see that a pro­posed mora­to­ri­um on new coal plants in Kansas is like­ly to fail. Gov­er­nor Sebe­lius, while pro­mot­ing ener­gy con­ser­va­tion, is not tak­ing the bold­er step of block­ing new coal plant con­struc­tion, which means that there’s no pres­sure on the leg­is­la­ture to sup­port a cool­ing-off period. 

A pause like that would give time for the state to pur­sue a com­pre­hen­sive ener­gy plan. 

Inter­na­tion­al investors are look­ing for oppor­tu­ni­ties to pro­duce wind pow­er in Kansas, and we have a lot of wind to use. Build­ing wind farms would gen­er­ate rev­enue for rur­al economies and sta­bi­lize income for farm­ers whose land would be used. It would bring jobs to those areas, and that source of elec­tric­i­ty could also attract industry. 

Gov­er­nor Sebe­lius has declared an inten­tion to pur­sue an ener­gy strat­e­gy in this term, and I hope it goes beyond sub­si­diz­ing pro­duc­tion of ethanol. Ethanol is nice, but it won’t change the curves in the EIA graph above. Pro­mot­ing renew­able ener­gy would. So would nuclear pow­er, which is an area that the leg­is­la­ture is pur­su­ing, through prop­er­ty tax abate­ments on new pow­er plants. While I’m not anti-nuclear, that leaves us with the still-seri­ous prob­lem of waste disposal.

Kansas util­i­ties spend the least mon­ey per capi­ta pro­mot­ing ener­gy effi­cien­cy; push­ing the util­i­ties to encour­age effi­cien­cy would be a big step, as would encour­ag­ing munic­i­pal­i­ties to include ener­gy effi­cien­cy in local build­ing codes. Pass­ing a net meter­ing law would be a rev­enue-neu­tral way to pro­mote renew­able ener­gy and rur­al economies. Offer­ing low-inter­est loans to farm­ers and coop­er­a­tives that want to set up their own wind farms would do a lot of good as well. Rather than reduc­ing prop­er­ty tax­es, and putting util­i­ty cus­tomers on the hook for what­ev­er new coal plants might cost, those poli­cies could set Kansas on a path to ener­gy inde­pen­dence, and pre­pare us for a post-petro­le­um economy.