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July 17, 2013 09:43 AM UTC
6 Comments
please confirm if my plain English understanding is close…
electrical co-ops, which provide service to large areas of Colorado, would buy commit to buy their electricity from a coal (or nuke) plant in west Kansas. If they do not ocmmit- the plant will not get built.
Tri-State in particular wants the plant to be built, and so does not want to invest at all into the now mandated by law other sources. Rather than follow the law, they are trying to change the law.
Very good, grasshopper! Yes, the plant can not be built without Tri-State's commitment to buy the power. If you drill in to my link regarding '….the folly' there is a lot of detail surrounding the financial [non]well-being of Sunflower.
Back in 2005 they were being too cute by half: their Board chair at the time, little Hub Thompson, was going to show the Colorado environmental community who was the real boss. He knew he couldn't get a plant built in Colorado – so he lead the board to a decision to build just over the state line. And coincidnetally, Sunflower was looking for ways to recover from their series of financial mis-steps that effectively put them in to receivership by the RUS. To date they have spent [or blown, depending upon your perspective] tens of millions of dollars. As a member of one of their cooperatives with a Capital Account I'd like to tap someday – their fiduciary responsiblity should be called in to question.
Sunflower Electric owes hundreds of millions of dollars to the federal government and has been bailed out from the brink of bankruptcy multiple times. In 2002, the federal Rural Utilities Service agreed to write off hundreds of millions of dollars of Sunflower’s taxpayer debt so that the company would appear financially stable enough to attract private funding for a new coal burning power plant in Kansas. A federal court in D.C. held that the federal agency had to take a close look at the project’s health and environmental impacts before giving away such a huge sum of taxpayer dollars. It’s a close look that this project can’t survive—it doesn’t even meet the federal standards for dangerous pollutants like mercury and ozone constituents. Section 5206 in the Farm Bill would retroactively undo this already-decided case and would shield Sunflower’s squandered federal dollars and poor project planning from badly-needed oversight.
I can only hope that this proposed change via the House-passed farm bill didn't originate from the offices of my avowed conservative Congressman. If so, we're going to have to re-define 'conservative'. I'm going to stop taking his attacks on Solyndra "cum grano salis"…
Madco – to make things worse, if it had gone by regular order, there would be a committee report available that would 'shed the light' on who included this provision. This version of the Farm Bill violated every House rule known to man. They waived their self-imposed 3-day rule [with an affirmative vote from Congressman Gardner] and told their caucus there were no changes. And twisted arms on the House floor during the vote to the point of breakage.
Since it didn't go by regular order and there is no committee report out it will be impossible to detect fingerprints on that provision unless a House republican ag staffer were to confess voluntarily. That isn't going to happen. So for now we can play the game of 'elimination'…which isn't that hard to do. But all it gives us is circumstantial evidence.
Mike–How long is Tri-State going ride this dead horse? I would think the final poison pill is EPA's New Source Performance Standards that would require Holcum to sequester its carbon.
Their current plan seems to be to make enough noise about SB252 and pretend they might make it 'go away' in the next session that they could convince someone in the legislature or the Gov's office to give them an extended period of time to 'comply'. All the while, trying to keep the Holcombplant plausibly alive.
This latest attempt to find an end-around via the Farm Bill is a desperate attempt to try and keep all of the balls in the air. And hope the Republicans take the Governors office in 2014. Remember, they've been doubling down on 'stupid' since the 2006 Ritter gubernatorial campaign. And each time they do, their failed bets [they're batting 1.000] gets expotentially more expensive for its cooperative members.