By the end of this year, Westar will have put into service the largest wind energy project in Kansas history – a 300-megawatt, half-billion-dollar investment in the latest wind power technologies. It will help serve the needs of our customers for 20 years or more. Unfortunately, this paper’s editorial chose to ignore that unprecedented commitment and instead criticized our decision to defer an additional 200-megawatt project, claiming that we were trying to profit too much from our wind power program. In fact, we sought to earn a return on only half our commitment.

Why are we moving ahead with the largest wind power project in our state, but holding off plans for more? Because of the realities we all face in Kansas in trying to make decisions today that will still be good in 20 years.

We believe in wind power – we came to the Kansas Corporation Commission (KCC) on our own to seek approval of our projects. Kansas has abundant wind to harness, and the technology of wind turbines has come a long way in the last few years.

But wind power has risks. No one can predict exactly when, where and how much the wind will blow over the next 20 years. No one knows for sure how the current generation of turbines will perform over the long haul. What is good technology today will likely change and improve over the coming years.

The KCC approved our request to recover our investments through future rates – but held out the option of revisiting the decision in two years and imposing penalties if Westar’s project does not perform as we all hope it will. Similar potential penalties have never been applied to other forms of power generation.

It is hard to imagine any of us in our personal lives making an unconditional, 20-year commitment to anything if the other party warned you it might later change the terms, even penalize you. At least you would not take that risk without expecting something in return. The KCC also turned down our request to earn an additional 1 percent on our rate of return for these projects, even though our request was half the incentive return that the state legislature allowed when it sought to encourage the very investments we are making. One percent would be about a dime a month for a customer. Why single out for penalty or fail to offer incentives for the very form of power so many of us say we want to have? These wind projects, after all, are part of our broader effort to avoid or at least delay building a traditional coal power plant, the cost of which has nearly doubled in recent years.

It does not make sense for us to fully commit to a broader use of wind power with all the risks that come with it until all of us in Kansas are fully committed to share that risk. One cannot say he supports wind power and yet discourage or even penalize those who are taking the risks to move it forward.