Over the past 25 years, wind turbines have sprouted up all over Kansas. Today, nearly 4,000 of them dot the landscape. About 400 of them are taller than the Statue of Liberty. While much of the nation has embraced this form of renewable energy, Commentator Rex Buchanan says we still haven't curbed our appetite for fossil fuel.
(Transcript)
Lately I’ve been working on a book project that involves revisiting some places in the state, places I last saw about 20 years ago. In that 20 years, some parts of the Kansas landscape haven’t changed much.
But some have. Maybe the biggest change is related to energy. Just about everywhere you go in the state, you see wind farms. Some of them, like the one near Montezuma in southwestern Kansas, have been around for a long time.
Others, like the ones that line I-70 out by Colby, are newer.
We’ve heard a lot about the advent of wind power in Kansas. Kansas is now among the country’s leaders in wind generation, producing almost half of the electricity used in the state. You’ve probably seen the maps showing about 40 wind farms scattered across Kansas. But until you seen them in person, especially their scale, it’s hard to comprehend how big wind power has become. The wind farm in Ellsworth County lines 24 miles of I-70. And today’s turbines are big, much larger than the ones near Montezuma.
With all that wind power has come another change in the landscape. New transmission lines. The electricity generated by wind turbines must be carried to where it’s needed, and that’s made for lots more large-scale transmission lines.
According to national stories, development of new wind generation has slowed down across the country. At the same time, solar energy is picking up. People in Douglas County, and many parts of the state, know about proposals for these new, large installations.
One is already operating in Stanton County, out in far southwestern Kansas. It’s 75,000 panels spread out over 144 acres. A much bigger one is under construction east of Medicine Lodge in Barber County, expected to come on-line next year.
In short, Kansas is contributing mightily to the increased production of renewable energy. But that contribution hasn’t come easy. Locating some of these facilities has been, and continues to be, contentious, to say the least.
Yet maybe the statistic that I find most striking is that, in spite of all the additional renewable energy production in Kansas and across the country, fossil fuel consumption nationwide hasn’t gone down all that much. On a percentage basis, we still use fossil fuels for about 80 percent of our energy. That’s maybe down a little from a few years ago, but not down by much. Renewables account for about 20 percent of the energy we use.
While the production of renewable energy goes up, so does the overall amount of energy we use. Renewables may take up the slack, helping satisfy that new demand, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to dramatically using less fossil fuel.
If you care about climate change, and I can’t quite see why you wouldn’t, that last statistic, about our continued reliance on fossil fuel, makes apparent just how hard it’ll be to mitigate climate change.
We’ve come a long way, when it comes to renewables. Driving across the state makes that clear. But we’ve still got a long, long way to go. ####
Commentator Rex Buchanan is a writer, author and director emeritus of the Kansas Geological Survey. He lives in Lawrence.