Fifty-five percent of people responding to a Lawrence, Kansas, newspaper poll this afternoon said they were not surprised that only a week after Kathleen Sebelius left the governor's office to become secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Kansas made a deal ending its iconic battle with Sunflower Electric. (A few minutes later the vote tally had moved closer to half and half: Half the people were surprised, the other half not. Alright, there were only 58 voters at the time. Still, they must have been people interested enough to follow the issue.)
The newspaper called today's announcement a "stunning development." It was, whether one was entirely surprised or not. The Sunflower battle has been a kind of flagship case for anti-coal plant interests.
Sebelius was indeed a rock on the issue -- either a stalwart proponent of forcing the state to a non-coal-dependent future, or an immovable roadblock to progress, depending on the point of view. Pro-coal plant members of the Legislature were working madly to get the votes to override her fourth veto of Sunflower's plant. Although then-Lieutenant Governor Mark Parkinson has also had also been a critic of the project, some people had thought he would be less intransigent. And sure enough, a deal came quickly.
Sunflower will get to build one of the two coal-fired power units it had been trying for. It will also have to build a wind farm or buy 179 MW of new wind capacity, meet a new state 20% renewables standard five years early, by 2015, build transmission lines to the Colorado line and burn some biomass with the coal.
No word yet about whether the Sierra Club would try taking some action against the compromise. But the Lawrence Journal-World quotes Tom Thompson, a lobbyist for the organization's Kansas chapter: "I would say that I hope it doesn’t become a model for the rest of the country if it means that the rest of the country starts building more coal plants." The club will evaluate the agreement -- in a legislative package that includes renewables, efficiency, net metering and more -- before deciding what to do about it.
At the Kansas City Star, an editorialist wondered why Parkinson approved "such a questionable compromise, beyond political practicality? Maybe he's thinking Congress will approve new controls on emissions as part of a global warming bill. If so, that could kill all future coal-fired plants, including the Kansas one."
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