Les Evans is currently the vice president of power supply for the Kansas Electric Power Cooperative, or KEPCo. KEPCo is a nonprofit generation and transmission (G&T) cooperative. Its membership is made up of nineteen rural electric cooperatives that sell power in predominantly rural areas of eastern and central Kansas. Evans is also a commissioner on KETA, the Kansas Electric Transmission Authority (KETA).
An electrical engineer by training – “I went to K-State! I bleed purple!” – Evans has been in the power utility industry since college. He has a long perspective on how the power industry works.
(For a .pdf copy of this interview, click here)
Photo: Les Evans on his bike outside of the Gray County wind farm
at Montezuma, KS (southwest of Dodge City about 25 miles) – during Bike Across Kansas in 2005
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Nancy Jackson, CEP: Why don’t you start out by telling us a little about yourself, what your background is, and what you have done in the industry over time.
Les Evans (LE): I grew up on a farm in south-central Kansas just north of Wichita – my hometown is Valley Center. I started out with the predecessor to Westar, the old Kansas Gas and Electric Company, KG&E. When I left Westar in 2001 I went to work exclusively in the renewable energy business. Then I had a chance to come back here to my roots and work with KEPCo.
NJ: You’re the vice-president of power supply – could you describe exactly what that means?
LE: It means I have responsibility for providing a reliable and economic power supply for KEPCo’s member cooperatives. Doing that can be a challenge because we don’t own all of our power generation resources. We also buy a significant portion of our power supply through long term purchase power agreements (PPA’s). KEPCo’s nineteen members are all distribution companies that take the power we provide and then provide it to retail customers – or in our case, also our owners.
A rural electric cooperative works differently than an investor-owned utility. We don’t have shareholders versus customers. In a cooperative, they are one and the same.
NJ: What does KEPCo’s power supply mix look like?
LE: It’s very diverse. I like to use an analogy here – different utilities will have different philosophies about how to put a power supply together. It’s just like different people have different preferences, or different risk tolerances, for their own personal investing strategies.
So for power supply, there is no one set of right answers. The power supply mix is also based on your members’ desires, needs, and tolerance for risk. What various aspects do they give significant weight to? So, in the case of KEPCO…
NJ: Sorry to interrupt – but how do you know your members’ tolerance for risk? How do you judge that?
Kansas and the wind revolution
July 1, 2008
Probably one of those articles you should just click over to and read in full – from Business Week, a feature on the Kansas energy picture, including three of its major figures – Governor Kathleen Sebelius, Sunflower Electric CEO Earl Watkins, and wind farmer Pete Farrell.
Headline and sub-head: “Wind: The Power. The Promise. The Business. A partial answer to America’s energy crisis is springing up. But the struggle to harness the winds of Kansas shows the difficulty in building an industry that threatens the status quo.“
Gist of it: “Kansas, in the middle of the wind belt, has become a battleground for the wind revolution. Advocates of alternative energy are pitted against defenders of the status quo, which in Kansas means coal. The flash point: a proposal by Sunflower Electric Power to build two 700-megawatt, coal-fired power plants in western Kansas. State regulators denied permits on the basis of CO2 emissions, the Republican-controlled legislature passed bills to overturn the ruling, Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius vetoed the bills, and the legislature has narrowly sustained her vetoes. So ferocious is this fight that Sunflower and its allies placed ads in newspapers suggesting that because Sebelius is against their coal project she’s playing into the hands of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The poisoned atmosphere helps explain why Kansas has only 364megawatts of wind power capacity from about 300 turbines, despite having some of the hardest-blowing wind in the country, while Texas produces more than 10 times as much.”
There’s a Bleeding Kansas vibe to the story. Not only are we ground zero for the nation’s ongoing coal controversy – but, throw wind into the mix as well.
— Maril Hazlett, www.climateandenergy.org
