Company’s coal plant plans put in center of global warming debate

HOLCOMB, KAN. - On a cool spring day, the temperature inside the big block building still hovers above 110 degrees near the house-sized boiler where powdered coal is burned to create steam and generate electricity.

Sunflower Electric Power Corp., the building’s owner, finds itself in a political furnace for wanting to build two or three coal-fired plants next to the one already rising from the Great Plains in southwest Kansas. The state’s decision on granting a needed environmental permit is nearly four months overdue, delayed by a raft of comments, including criticism from California and New York officials.

Sunflower, which supplies power to six smaller western Kansas cooperatives with 122,000 customers, is part of a national debate over whether coal is the best way to go. This quiet farm town of 1,900 hasn’t seen this much attention since the 1959 murders of the Herb Clutter family, the basis of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.”

Anticipating greater demands for electricity, utilities are building or seeking air and site permits for 94 coal-fired projects and are planning as many as 65 more, according to Global Energy Decisions, a Boulder Colo., data, software and consulting company. Environmentalists hope to slow or even halt the trend, seeing each project as a source of carbon dioxide that will worsen global warming.

“Coal is still the workhorse,” said Ed Legge, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, a Washington-based group for shareholder-owned utilities. “The word has been that we’re going to use more of it before we use less of it. It’s cheap and it’s here.”

Yet utilities’ plans come amid growing pressure on the federal government to regulate CO2 emissions. In April, the U.S. Supreme Court said carbon dioxide was a pollutant that could be regulated under federal law, and last week President Bush ordered his administration to begin work on new rules.

“There’s a real recognition that the future isn’t in carbon-intensive industries. It’s in clean energy. It’s going to happen whether we want it to or not,” said Rebecca Tarbotton, director of the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network’s campaign to stop financing of “dirty energy” projects.

Sunflower’s plans seem to belie such thinking.

Its Holcomb plant can generate 360 megawatts and last year it applied for an air quality permit from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment allowing it to build three adjacent 700-megawatt coal-fired plants, boosting generating capacity more than seven times when construction on the $5 billion project is finished in 2013.

Sunflower said the plants would use the best emissionscontrol technology available and not increase pollution, but environmentalists complain it would be the biggest coal-burning site west of the Mississippi River.

Opponents also are upset that much of the new electricity would be exported to other states. Many local officials endorse the project because of the potential for 2,000 new construction jobs and an expansion of the local economy. Sunflower says exporting power will provide revenue to keep its rates in check.

“We were out hustling for the business,” said Sunflower spokesman Steve Miller, pointing out the power lines and tall towers that stretch from the Holcomb site across the Plains toward Colorado and Texas. “It results in money for us so that we don’t have to share costs with our members.”

Driving utilities’ interests are projections by the U.S. Department of Energy that electric use in 2030 will be 41 percent higher than in 2005.

Coal is seen as cheap, costing one-sixth or less than natural gas, and the American Coal Council estimates the United States has enough deposits to last 250 years.

In January and February, coal-fired plants generated half the electricity in the United States.

Critics contend utilities typically don’t consider the cost of environmental problems in their financial calculations.

“They’re kind of like a stampeding herd,” said Craig Volland, of the Sierra Club’s Kansas chapter. “They all looked at nuclear back in the 1970s. Then they all looked at coal, and then they all looked at natural gas.”

The state originally anticipated deciding on Sunflower’s permit in February, but KDHE spokesman Joe Blubaugh said this week it is still reviewing comments.

The attorneys general of California, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin complained Sunflower’s project would counter their states’ efforts to control greenhouse gas emissions.

Amid those delays, one of Sunflower’s partners in Colorado announced it wouldn’t need one of the new coal plants on line as quickly as anticipated, raising questions about whether it would be built.

Meanwhile, other utilities have had mixed experiences with plans for coal-fired plants. Global Energy Decisions says an additional 22 projects have been postponed over permitting issues, environmental protests, financial issues, a utility waiting to make sure it can sell the new power or states restricting greenhouse gas emissions or banning coal-fired plants.

Kansas City Power & Light Co. signed an agreement in March with two groups to allow construction of one in northwest Missouri with environmentally friendly modifications.

But Kansas’ largest electric utility, Westar Energy, shelved plans last year for a new coalfired plant when projected cost rose from $1 billion to $1.4 billion.

Coal industry officials say they’re working on pollutioncontrol technology to make coal burn cleaner and methods for recycling carbon dioxide. The Wyoming coal Sunflower uses is considered cleaner than coal from other regions.

“I breathe the same air as the environmentalists who live down the street,” said Jason Hayes, a coal council spokesman in Phoenix.

But Tarbotton and other environmentalists see “cleaner coal” technology and methods for collecting CO2, pumping it underground and storing it so that it stays out of the atmosphere, as still too experimental. Global warming, they said, is an immediate problem.

“If we’re building coal-fired plants right now, we’re locking in the technology being used right now,” she said. “We’re locking in dirty coal.”

Plants at a glance

THE PLAN: Sunflower Electric Power Corp. proposed building three new, 700-megawatt coal-fired plants next to its existing 360-megawatt plant outside Holcomb.

THE OPPOSITION: Environmentalists worry the new plants would contribute significantly to global warming.

NATIONAL TREND: Utilities nationwide are building or seeking air and site permits for 94 coalfired projects and are planning as many as 65 more, according to Global Energy Decisions, a Boulder Colo., data, software and consulting company.

STATUS: The state still hasn’t decided whether to issue Sunflower the needed air-quality permit. The status of one proposed plant also is in doubt.