photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

During a work session on Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2023, the Douglas County Commission heard more about the future of energy generation from a panel of local experts.

The Douglas County Commission continues to get pushback from rural residents who say they’re concerned about the possibility of any large-scale renewable energy projects in southern Douglas County.

The commission’s work session on Wednesday afternoon, a discussion about the future of energy generation with a panel of local experts, drew some attendance from members of the public — some of whom came wearing T-shirts emblazoned with anti-wind turbine messages. And a portion of that group stuck around to offer public comment at the beginning of the commission’s regular meeting shortly afterward.

Recently, when action or discussion related to wind or solar energy has been on the County Commission’s meeting agenda, there has been a consistent presence from folks voicing their concerns about Florida-based NextEra Energy Resources. The firm has previously expressed an interest in large-scale solar and wind projects in areas of southern Douglas County. There was no explicit mention of NextEra during the work session on Wednesday, but that didn’t stop a few commenters from speaking out against large-scale wind development in general during the public comment period.

One of them, Catherine Ellsworth, specifically asked whether the company’s interest was a reason that the commission scheduled such work sessions in the first place.

“I’m not against wind or solar, but my fear is with work sessions like the one tonight, you are stacking up evidence to reinforce your existing support of NextEra’s project,” Ellsworth said.

Commissioner Karen Willey, however, maintained that the point right now was to get information about energy projects in general, and that it wasn’t about any specific project or company at this point.

“This is a time in the process where we collect information and we gather information, we hear from the public, we hear from experts,” Willey said. “All of that is entirely appropriate. We do recognize that there are specific companies looking for specific projects. Of course we knew that, of course we know that. What we have said from up here is that we do not have an application, which means that we do not have something to vote on in front of us, which is what I think is what the community has wanted, but that’s not where we are in the process. And as uncomfortable as that is, we have a ways to go.”

The county described the work session itself as a “high-level discussion about the evolving future of energy generation,” including a technical perspective on current and projected allocations of different kinds of energy from a range of different sources and regional and national energy trends. Commissioners heard about those topics from experts such as Kansas Geological Survey director Jay Kalbas; Ashok Gupta, a senior energy economist with the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Climate and Energy Program; and Donna Ginther, a distinguished professor of economics and the director of the Institute for Policy and Social Research at the University of Kansas.

If that sounds complicated, it’s because it is; in fact, when Kalbas showed a graphic visualizing how much energy the United States uses compared to how much it wastes, he described it as “uber-complicated.”

photo by: Douglas County

A graph shared during a recent Douglas County Commission work session, which one presenter described as “uber-complicated,” shows a visualization of how much of the country’s energy is used and wasted.

But some questions from commissioners seemed to touch on the ongoing discourse in the county surrounding solar and wind development. Commissioner Shannon Reid, for example, asked presenters what entity has authority over transmission lines, which “an energy developer who wanted to create a wind development or solar development” may use to transfer the electricity they generate back to the electrical grid.

And fellow Commissioner Patrick Kelly said the commission has often heard that instead of large-scale industrial wind or solar projects, there’s more vocal support from commenters for individual-scale renewable energy generators. Kelly asked how relying more on such smaller-scale energy generation would affect power resources.

“It shouldn’t be either-or, but I think for a reliability perspective for a utility to meet its obligations, we’re going to need large-scale renewables,” Gupta said. “I think we can maybe reduce them a little bit, and we should be encouraging more on-site solar, but how that fits in with electrification of transportation and growth and other things, we should be looking at that.”