Live Blogging: Notes from the Kansas Energy Council (KEC) Electricity Committee meeting
May 15, 2008
Location/ Date: SRS building, Topeka KS, 05/12/08
Group: Kansas Energy Council (KEC) Committee on Electricity. The KEC is a 35 member group formed by a 2004 Executive Order from Gov. Sebelius (most recently updated this spring), and it is charged with making energy policy recommendations. Members of its Electricity Committee can be found here. (FYI, for those of you who have followed the legislative live blogging, legislators on this committee are Janis Lee, Carl Holmes, Mark Taddiken, and Tom Sloan.)
Objectives: In January, the Electricity Committee decided to pursue the following: (1) utility-by-utility understanding of KS baseload resources, (2) why past baseload decisions were made, (3) ID carbon dioxide emissions from existing units, and (4) planning for future demand, not limited to baseload.
Work plan: compile unit and emissions data for utilities, listen to utility presentations, try to gain access to peak load forecast data.
Summary: The Committee discussed their data aggregation and listened to presentations from Sunflower Electric and Kansas Municipal Energy Association (after being edited for proprietary info, those will also be posted on the KEC website).
Most interesting factoid: This was mentioned as an aside, not as part of the official presentations, but many of you might not know this – Kansas electricity prices are among some of the lowest in the nation right now, and over the past twenty years they have stayed relatively stable.
However, our usage has grown. Basically, we’re plugging more things in. Which is essentially one of the major reasons there has to be an Electricity Committee meeting in the first place.
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Background: The KEC is one of several groups currently examining Kansas energy policy. This past legislative session CEP followed both the House and Senate Energy and Utilities Committees, as well as the House Select Committee on Energy and Environment.
The Governor also just appointed members to the Kansas Energy and Environment Policy Advisory Group (KEEP), which will participate in a climate action plan facilitated by the Center for Climate Strategies, which has worked with 18 other states. Last year the KEC rejected a proposal to work with CCS.
Additionally, one of two new legislative groups will probably come into being after sine die on May 29. If the Governor does not veto the third coal plant bill, then a commission on science and technology will come into being.
If there is a veto, then a provision in the nuclear bill, SB 586, comes into effect (provided that the Governor signs that bill). It will create the Joint Committee on Energy and Environment.
Having sat in on at least a few of these groups, CEP has noted that Kansas energy policy groups often struggle with similar issues in how to approach electricity. (Probably these issues are not limited to KS policymakers, either.)
1 - Overwhelmingly, “electricity” is interpreted as “baseload generation” (and often, “reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs)” is interpreted as “regulating utilities” – GHGs in fact have many more sources than electrical generation).
2 - These groups also struggle with data collection categories that were originally developed to understand and assess electricity as generated from fossil fuels. However, the way data was tracked in the past doesn’t necessarily help to tell the world what it now wants to know – how to track carbon dioxide emissions, and promote renewable energy.
3 – Fuel prices, construction costs, policy initiatives, etc. – it’s all changing so fast that past data doesn’t necessarily help predict future performance. Decisions have to be made now, though. When you don’t always have solid information to stand on, then you have to make decisions based on other criteria. What are those criteria?
New study traces how climate change has gradually changed the timing of the seasons. During spring in North America, 89 plant species have started flowering earlier in the spring, and bird breeding and migration patterns have moved earlier as well. With the seasonal change of food supplies and sea ice, polar bears have turned to cannibalism and their population has declined (Reuters). Quotable from the lead researcher:
The link between human-caused global warming — generated by industrial and vehicle emissions of carbon dioxide to produce a temperature-boosting greenhouse effect — and observed biological and physical changes is very strong, she said.
On a global scale, the correlation is more than 99 percent between the two factors; on a continental scale, she said, the correlation if very likely between 90 and 99 percent.
Building on IPCC research, this mega study combined 30,000 data sets from case studies of biological and physical changes around the world. It matched the results with a detailed database of global temperature change, dating from 1970-2004.
Department of Interior lists polar bear listed as threatened species. DOI made the decision based on the dramatic loss of polar bear habitat, the melting of Arctic sea ice, that has occurred over the past three decades. However, they warned that the decision should not be seen as related to global warming, and that above it all it shouldn’t change any economic development initiatives like building power plants (Wash. Post). Interesting quotable:
Interior spokeswoman Tina Kreisher said the ruling will still allow energy exploration in Alaska and will not affect power plants and other greenhouse gas emitters in the contiguous United States, but that the department would establish a management plan for polar bears and monitor their populations.
“There isn’t a power plant right next to these bears,” Kreisher said. “That’s the quandary here.”
CEP analysis: Climate change messes with how we traditionally analyze risk. Risk is much easier to understand on a small scale – when you can point to a substance or an action that leads to an easily quantifiable, immediate impact.
But when that risk involves many separate causes and it affects an entire atmosphere, an entire planet – it’s a lot harder to wrap your head and even your science around. And the risk may be even too big for puny human efforts to completely quantify.
Which leaves us… where?
Cool story about strange bedfellows. Sort of related to climate and energy. I’m mostly posting it because I love it when politics don’t line up like they’re supposed to. Increasingly, environmental issues make this happen a lot.
Such as in Colorado, where hunters and environmentalists are joining forces in the fight against expanded oil and gas drilling (CSMonitor). This particular fight is over the Roan Plateau. Quotable:
The coalition’s fight is part of a rising opposition of sportsmen to the effects of energy development – a force reshaping Colorado politics and altering environmental politics across the West.
“We started organizing and speaking out, loud and clear,” says David Peterson, co-chair of Colorado Backcountry Hunters and Anglers and state field director for Trout Unlimited’s public lands initiative. “It was really Bush’s arrogance that created today’s conservation movement among disgruntled sportsmen, mostly traditional-values Republicans – ‘Roosevelt Republicans,’ I call them.”
How is this happening? In part because the terms of the debate are changing. In this case, both sportsmen and environmentalists are in favor of moderation and limits when it comes to industrial development.
… Sportsmen involved in the dispute say they do not oppose drilling outright. They just want to see it done right.
“We have never encountered something like this on this scale – there is no precedent,” says Bob Elderkin, president of the Rifle chapter of the Colorado Mule Deer Association, recently retired from overseeing oil and gas leasing for the BLM. He says he understands the need for energy development, but adds: “I’ve been around the oil patch long enough to know that when this is played out, this entire area will look like an industrial zone.”
Keith Goddard of Rifle, an outfitter who leads hunting and fishing trips on the Roan, has been one of the most vocal opponents of drilling on the plateau. Early on in the fight, he joined with environmental groups. From behind his bushy cowboy mustache, Mr. Goddard says, “Years ago, I never thought I would sit at the same table as environmentalists. Now I am proud to have worked with these people.”
The feeling is mutual, as environmentalists, who have felt marginalized in public lands planning under the Bush administration, have found powerful new partners.
Kind of funny, isn’t it? Today’s bipartisan politics pretty much depends on keeping so-called gun-toting rednecks/ NASCAR types, and so-called anti-gun hippies, completely separate.
Hmm, what does happen to the politicians if these two groups get together?
— Maril Hazlett, www.climateandenergy.org
