U.S.
Editor’s note: This is the last in a three-part series on the impact of Gov. Sam Brownback’s policies on Kansas. The first story examined his re-election race, and the second looked at cuts to the state education budget.
SALINA, Kan. — Throughout most of Kansas’ history, some things have been true: The wheat is tall. The cattle are strong. And the wind has been mostly annoying. “Kansas is herself again,” a newspaperman from this central town snarked on a blustery day in April 1880. “A newcomer asked one of our fellow townsmen if it always blew this way in Kansas.” (The answer, in short, was yes.)
Today the wind still rolls off the Rocky Mountains and barrels across the Great Plains, kicking up dust, ruffling fields and ruining cellphone conversations. But increasingly, Kansans are finding that wind from the west may be yet another golden resource of the state — able to generate huge amounts of electricity and make them money in the process. A growing awareness of that windfall is cutting across partisan lines, winning adherents to a green energy source in a state otherwise dominated by deep red oil and cattle conservatives.
“The wind goes by. You just might as well use it,” said Jim Warta, a 70-year-old rancher whose family has been farming in Kansas’ central Ellsworth County for five generations. In 2008 he and his wife, Laura, opened part of their 1,500 acres to Massachusetts-based Enel Green Power, which built 11 wind turbines there — some of the roughly 150 turbines producing 250 megawatts of electricity across the Smoky Hills region, where they live.
The Wartas still make most of their money from wheat, soybeans and their herd of muscular black-and-brown beef cattle. But the extra money from the electricity generated on his land (about 3 percent of the cost per megawatt), is a welcome addition each month. The turbines also drive up the value of the land, Warta says — land he can continue to use for grazing and crops, unlike property given over to oil drilling. “I’ve been to a couple sales since then and tried to buy property that had the turbines on them. It’s unbelievable what it brings.”
The demand reflects a growing realization of Kansas’ potential as a leader in renewable energy. At full capacity it would generate more wind energy than any other state except Texas, according to the U.S. Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which says Kansas wind could produce 3.1 million gigawatt hours annually. That’s equivalent to three-quarters of the total electricity generated by all energy sources in the United States last year. Despite growing investment that has nearly tripled Kansas wind-energy production since 2010, the state’s producers generated only 9,430 gigawatt hours last year — 0.3 percent of the potential.
That’s in part because a small but politically influential group of Kansans is in the way. About 100 miles south of Warta’s ranch stands the Wichita headquarters of one of the most powerful energy corporations in the country, Koch Industries, whose leaders — libertarian political financiers Charles and David Koch — are sworn enemies of the wind. The Koch-funded advocacy group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is leading the fight to repeal a federal tax credit for wind energy producers, based on the amount of electricity they produce, which has helped fuel the Kansas boomlet. Opposition to the credit in Congress has been championed by Rep. Mike Pompeo, a Republican whose district includes Wichita and whose top campaign contributors are oil and gas in general and Koch Industries in particular.
“Extending the wind [tax credit] is a key priority for the Obama administration and its efforts to prop up wind and other favored green energy technologies,” Pompeo and 53 other Republicans wrote in a letter to the GOP House leadership last month. “Growth in wind energy is not driven by market demand but instead by a combination of state mandates and a federal tax credit that is now more valuable than the actual market price of the electricity these plants generate.”
In Kansas such arguments are having little effect. Americans for Prosperity and the Kansas Chamber of Commerce (another major recipient of Koch money) spent months trying to get the Republican-controlled state legislature to repeal a state renewable-energy standard that requires about 10 percent of electricity in the state to be purchased from renewable resources, including wind; the requirement will rise to 20 percent by 2020. But the legislature refused. “This energy is an export every bit as much as airplanes,” said state Rep. Russ Jennings, a Republican from western Kansas, according to The Wichita Eagle, comparing renewable energy to the formerly dominant aviation industry in central Kansas.
AFP’s Kansas director, Jeff Glendening, responded in that article by mentioning legislators’ campaign promises to support the free market — a not-so-subtle reminder, perhaps, of where their campaign contributions came from.
The exact reasons the Koch-funded empire has been dead set against wind energy aren’t clear. In a 2012 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Charles Koch said that tax breaks for wind, solar and biofuels were distorting the U.S. energy market, while acknowledging that his company benefits from tax breaks. (Further, alternative energy tax breaks are dwarfed by billions of dollars in annual subsidies to the oil industry.) Several messages sent to Koch Industries asking for comment were not returned.
Caught in the middle is the state’s Republican governor, Sam Brownback, who is locked in a tough re-election fight against state House Minority Leader Paul Davis. Brownback has close ties to the anti-wind forces. (Koch Industries was the top donor throughout the governor's 16-year career in the U.S. Congress. Last month Brownback named Caleb Stegall, a recently appointed appeals court judge who had served as both the governor’s legal counsel and AFP’s, to the Kansas Supreme Court.)
But Brownback also recognizes the economics that make wind energy appealing to many otherwise reliably conservative voters. Thus he has found himself in the uncomfortable position of boasting about wind energy’s growth in the state — a source of several thousand much-needed jobs during his term — while trying to oppose the regulatory environment that has fostered that growth. In one particularly awkward moment in July, the governor told Eagle reporter Bryan Lowry that he opposed the state regulation, only to have his spokeswoman call the journalist seven and a half hours later to insist he was merely referring to the federal tax credit.
“I supported wind from the outset,” Brownback told the Eagle.
Warta sees more practicality than politics when it comes to wind. Like many families on the Kansas prairie, his parents had a windmill-operated water pump in their fields when he was a child. He also recalls a small wind-powered charger that provided electricity to the farmhouse before the family switched over to the grid. When he began considering turbines in his fields, back in 2003, some people at community meetings warned him that the soaring propeller-like structures would ruin his crops or spook the cows. But the cows turned out not to mind them at all, Warta says, and loved the long shadows they cast over the prairie. “You’ll see the cows all laying in the breeze right down that shadow, and as the shadow moves, they’ll move,” he said.
Nor does he understand why the Kochs are opposed. After all, he noted, other oil companies such as BP are investing in the wind sector in Kansas and several other states. As for the governor, Warta said his advice would be clear: “He better be for it, because it’s good for Kansas.”
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