Climate and energy

To start a short summary with a long aside – it’s pretty cool to watch all the steps of the democratic process. The legislature passes the laws, but the next step is that the executive/ administrative branch then has to implement them.

Passing a law (as long and convoluted a process as that is) is only a first step. Implementation and enforcement are what give legislation – the will of the people – actual life.

So, the coal bill compromise legislation, HB 2369, must now come to life. The Kansas Corporation Commission (KCC) is responsible for implementing a large portion of it. The following comes from a great summary put together by the KCC’s Tom Day.

Some of the highest impact sections:

Renewable Energy Standards (RES) – The KCC has to come up with rules and regulations for administering and enforcing the act and for certifying what counts as a renewable. Some of the issues include quantifying exactly how much energy each utility (from all the IOUs and rural co-ops in the state) must generate from renewables, counting renewables generated from parallel generation and net metering, etc.

Net metering – The KCC also has to come up with rules and regs for net metering and interconnection standards, as well as a standardized, simplified interconnection process for systems 25 kW or less. Issues include monitoring the statewide reporting and systems cap – and setting up interconnection for systems from 25 kW to 200 kW (the customer cap) do get more complicated than the smaller, plug and play ones.

Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) – No other state in the nation has rules and regs for CAES. (KS was also one of the first to implement rules and regs for carbon dioxide sequestration). Kansas is cautiously inching out on the leading edge here. The costs of developing these regs could run close to $225,000.

The KCC will also need extra staff time to handle the dockets for the rate deregulation of large rural cooperatives who apply to do so. It was mentioned that two large co-ops – KEPCo and Midwest – apparently do not plan on applying to deregulate. It is widely expected that Sunflower Electric will apply to do so.

Of course, along with the rest of the nation Kansas had a pretty crummy budget year. As with many state agencies, the KCC now has less funds – and in the case of implementing energy legislation, they now have a lot more to do.

They have timetables to meet as well. The CAES rules and regs process must be completed within 18 months, and net metering and the RES will take 12 months.

— Maril Hazlett, www.climateandenergy.org