IT IS DIFFICULT to imagine a contrast greater than that between the reactions to the proposal to built a power plant in Lyon County and a proposal to build new power plants in Finney County.
In Lyon County, Westar’s plan to building a peaking power plant was greeted as good news. No groups — in the county or out of the county — have organized to oppose the plan.
But the announcement by Sunflower Electric that it and several out-of-state companies wanted to build three plants in Finney County has run into a brick wall of criticism across the state.
Why the difference? There are several reasons.
One is size. The Lyon County plant will be a peaking plant, operated only when demand requires Westar to increase its generating capacity for brief periods — usually in hot weather — to serve its Kansas customers. At most, the plant will be able to generate 600 megawatts of electricity.
The Finney County plants would be primary power plants, operating around the clock and producing up to 2,100 megawatts — much of which would be sent out of state.
But the biggest reason for the resistance is the difference in fuel. The Lyon County plant will burn relatively clean natural gas. The Finney County plants would burn coal, a dirty fuel more polluting than gas. Coal-fired plants would also put an added strain on the already scarce water supplies in western Kansas.
This does not mean that Westar is a good corporate citizen and Sunflower Electric is a rank polluter. Westar makes a lot of its electricity with coal. The reason the Lyon County plant will burn gas is that peaking plants must be started quickly, begin generating power quickly and be shut down just as quickly. It is much easier to do that with gas than with coal.
But natural gas is too expensive to be used as a primary fuel. Of the fossil fuels burned to make electricity, coal is by far the cheapest and most plentiful. Coal is the reason the United States has affordable electricity.
But the price of the fuel is only one of the costs of coal. Pollution has its own immediate and long-term costs in degraded air and water quality and a warming climate. Over the past several decades, people have become more aware of those costs.
That growing awareness is at the heart of the resistance to the Sunflower Electric plan. The reaction is likely to be just as strong to any similar proposals until and unless it becomes possible to build truly clean coal-fired plants.
How are Kansans to balance this new awareness with their own increasing demand for electricity?
There is no easy answer. Conservation can reduce demand, and there are clean ways to make electricity.
The state has no roaring rivers to turn generators, but it does have an inexhaustible supply of wind.
Nuclear power is not pollution-free, but its pollution is contained and controllable. The Wolf Creek plant at Burlington produces no carbon dioxide, no soot and no clouds of smoke — just electricity.
If Kansas is no longer willing to bear the costs of using coal, the state must decide what it is willing to do to keep the lights burning and air conditioners humming.
The sooner that question is answered, the better off the state will be.