Zombie Power Plant

By Robert F. Sommer

Given the exigencies of the time, Fomite would like to step outside its normal literary publishing practice, and add to its offerings a series of bound pamphlets on urgent political, social, cultural, and organizing issues from a radical, anti-capitalist viewpoint.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fomite
• Release date: May 25, 2020

Robert F. Sommer

Sixties counter-culture icon Mason Williams described Bob Sommer’s debut novel, Where the Wind Blew, as “a story of the past and an allegory of the present.” Bob’s essays and stories have appeared in Rathalla Review, New Plains Review, O-Dark-Thirty, The Whirlybird Anthology of Kansas City Writers, and various literary and scholarly journals. His freelance articles, reviews, and commentary include contributions to The Kansas City Star, Sierra, Chronogram, Rain Taxi, Counterpunch, and National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” He holds a doctorate in American Literature from Duke University and has authored Teaching Writing to Adults and co-authored The Heath Literature for Composition. Bob is the Director of Development for the Sierra Club in Kansas and a lecturer at the University of Saint Mary, Leavenworth. He blogs at Uncommon Hours and can also be found on-line at Poets&Writers and LinkedIn. He and his wife Heather make their home in Overland Park, Kansas.

Book preview

Zombie Power Plant

Zombie Power Plant

The Fifteen-Year Fight to Prevent a Coal-Burning Utility Plant from Breaking Ground on the Kansas Prairie

Robert F. Sommer

Fomite

Contents

Zombie Power Plant

Acknowledgments

About the Author

"We never win the battles,

but if you keep going long enough everyone

realizes what a stupid idea it was,

and you win the war."

---

Craig Volland

Sunflower (Helianthus annus), the state flower of Kansas

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Sunflower (Helianthus annus),

the state flower of Kansas

I

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Out There, Kansas

For many, for most, redundant.

And please, the Dorothy jokes are so, so tiresome.

Grok this to visualize Out There, Kansas: The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’ Setting and epithet courtesy of Truman Capote. A town forever set on a course it never wanted to travel after the grisly murder of the Clutter family in 1959, and then the unwelcome and painful attention delivered, and continuing over many decades, by Capote’s nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood.

Holcomb is in the southwest corner of mostly-rectangular Kansas, west of Dodge, west of Cimarron, just west of Garden City, in Finney County, where you can drive for a half-hour on a two-lane state highway without passing more than an occasional grain or cattle truck, or trail a combine hogging down the road at twenty mph for three, four miles. Enjoy the serene pastures and meadows. Watch for red-tailed hawks sailing overhead, eyeing the ground for morsels jittering or slithering through bluestem and switch grasses, or a committee of turkey vultures convening over a racoon carcass in the road. Miles of narrow county roads out there are paved with limestone gravel that kicks up stratocumulus clouds of dust behind your truck – because only trucks ever travel these roads.

Holcomb is also the site of one of the most contentious political battles in modern Kansas history – and few of those who fought it ever set foot in that town or even that part of the state. It’s a battle whose significance resonated well beyond Kansas, affecting energy and environmental policy throughout the Midwest and at the turning point of increasing public recognition that carbon dioxide (CO²) from coal-burning utility plants was the most significant contributor to climate change on the planet. Holcomb was the test-site for a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared carbon dioxide harmful to human health and the environment. In Kansas the word Holcomb became a metonym for the acrid hostility between the two political parties, among factions within each party, and between eastern and western Kansas.

Holcomb-the-place is the location of a medium-sized coal-fired utility station generating about 360 megawatts (MW) of electricity. (For the engineeringly unsavvy, like me, one megawatt = one million watts, or enough electricity to power about 650 homes for a year.) Sunflower Electric Power Corporation, the cooperative that owns the Holcomb Station, is headquartered in Hays, which is in central Kansas, midway on the I-70 stretch from Kansas City in the east and westward toward Colorado; or about 150 miles northeast of Holcomb via one of those state highways with the hawks and vultures circling overhead.

In 2005, Sunflower filed an air permit application with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE —this will come up a lot, so latch onto this handle) to expand its electric power generation capacity by adding not one, or even two, but three new coal-fired boiler plants, at 700 MW apiece (2100 MW of new capacity), to its existing fleet that until then totaled, with Holcomb, 600 MW. That application ignited a political firestorm whose embers still glowed 15 years later, and for some still haven’t cooled. The Holcomb Station served businesses and farms and residences in western Kansas, as well as out-of-state customers in Colorado and other surrounding states. While demand for energy from those customers was increasing, it wasn’t clear to many why 2100 MWs were needed or why those plants would be exclusively coal-fired when Kansas is the third windiest state in the country. And why Holcomb? The major population centers are in the eastern part of the state, in Topeka and Wichita and Kansas City, Kansas. ¹

On its face the proposal made no sense, and it came at time, a historical moment, when a lot of people had begun to figure out that coal-burning utility plants were a bad idea and needed to be shuttered. Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, was