Climate and energy

CEP’s Community Energy Forum in Salina went very well last night. (There is another in Overland Park tonight, and another in Topeka tomorrow – see CEP press release for details.)

CEP invited analysts from energy consulting firm Synapse Energy to the forum, and they had some interesting things to say. If you’d like to see the .pdf of the powerpoint presentation by David Schlissel and Ezra Hausman, please click here (.pdf, 1.3 MB)

From the Harris News coverage, some quotables:

Synapse senior consultant David Schlissel said federal limits on coal plants’ carbon emissions are “more than likely” in the near future.

“A proposal before Congress right now would mandate steep reductions of 50 to 80 percent in CO2 emissions,” Schlissel said. “The adoption of these federal regulations will mean substantial costs for new power plants that are coal- or gas-fired. Coal, of course, is the most carbon intensive.”

Synapse has developed a forecast of expected costs related to carbon emissions for power plants and other businesses.

If the regulatory cost, for instance, becomes $20 per ton each year, companies such as Sunflower that emit 12 million tons annually will have to purchase allowances of at least $240 million.

Part of Sunflower’s response that I found interesting – they again mentioned the potential of their bioenergy project (which is not contained in their proposal) as a partial offset to some of the problems with the proposed coal plant.

A while back, an argument you heard a lot was that Kansas wind power couldn’t be developed without transmission lines for coal power, and that turned out not to be the case. Now the coal cart is getting hitched to biofuels – but there’s a lot of lower cost ways to produce biofuels, with a lot more proven technology.

Also re renewables – on one hand, renewables are booming right now. On the other hand… that could all go south pretty quick (or at least take a significant detour) if the federal government does not renew the production tax credits for wind and solar. The renewal of these credits did not make it through the highly contentious battle over the energy bill, and the initiative is now up again before Congress (CSMonitor).

-– Maril Hazlett

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