Donald Trump’s first few days in office have brought a flurry of activity, so much that it’s going to take awhile to work through them. As I promised here before, I’m trying to focus on what he does, rather than what he says.
One particularly relevant move is pulling the plug on windmills. By that I mean canceling leases on federal land for big wind farms. While there are no such leases in our region, at least that I know of on federal land, the move is more than just symbolic, particularly around here.
He’s also talking down solar farms, and getting rid of support for electric cars. These will have consequences in our region in a variety of ways, but let’s start with the wind farms.
Kansas is a natural home for them, since the wind blows damn near all the time, and since we have a lot of wide open space. Makes sense to me to have more of them, although – to be blunt – I don’t want to look at them atop every rise in the Flint Hills. Basically I don’t want them to ruin the view.
That’s why the state government several years ago put a moratorium on them in the Flint Hills. Which I also support. I’m not saying they ought to be everywhere. I’m just saying they make sense in a lot of Kansas. Undercutting them at the federal level strikes me as not particularly good for our state, considering – among other things – that electric companies pay landowners well for the leases.
There are lots of ongoing debates, county-by-county, about allowing these or not. Some of those debates will simply go away if there’s not as much push from the feds.
Solar farms? Less of an issue here. But again, Kansas has a lot of open space, some of which could be used to generate solar energy. There are some already in the works.
Getting rid of support for electric cars seems likely to slow growth at the state’s biggest eco-devo bet, on the Panasonic plant in DeSoto. Exactly what that will mean is not yet clear, but if there aren’t as many electric cars sold, there will be fewer produced, and that means lower demand for electric car batteries.
Ideas matter. Elections have consequences. We’re just barely starting to figure out what those are.
