More Kansas businesses relying on renewable energy
WICHITA, Kan. (KSNW) – Kansas small businesses in rural areas are saving money through the Rural Energy for America Program.
“It’s important from an environmental and climate standpoint but also important for rural businesses because they don’t have, a lot of times, large markets,” USDA rural development state director Christy Davis said. “There are fine margins, so whatever we can do to make them sustainable and help the bottom line is good policy for rural America.”
Darren Barnes is the CEO of Bold LLC and took advantage of the program. He says installing solar panels slashed his electric bill by about 80%.
“When we started the business, our electricity bill for the size of the building, we had about 110,000 square feet, was very high,” Barnes said. “So we were looking at solutions to that and looked at what the government incentives were for solar panels and decided to take advantage of that opportunity.”
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Barnes says it is cost-effective and clean.
“We were looking long-term as well,” Barnes said. “When we started doing our research on it, we looked at the cost of the solar panels, plus the incentives we were getting, and the ROI on it was about seven years, and the life of the solar panels is about 25 years. It could be longer depending on weather and all that. It was a no-brainer. Seven-year return on investment, and then we have clean, affordable energy for the remainder of the life of their panels. So it was a pretty easy decision.”
Jeff McClanahan is the director of utilities at the Kansas Corporation Commission and says Kansas is one of the top five producers in the country. He says it’s great for renewable energy because Kansas is sunny and windy.
“It’s not going to go away,” McClanahan said. “That is an absolute certainty, and the penetration rate of renewables is going to continue to go up. That’s just a given with the federal incentives through tax credits.”
McClanahan says there has been steady growth of clean energy in Kansas.
“It’s a low cost source of energy when coupled with a tax credit as it has been throughout, so it’s a very low cost, and the lowest cost source of energy that we have, has no emissions,” McClanahan said. “Obviously, that’s very popular with a lot of folks and generally has lower maintenance costs compared to a coal or gas-fired generation facility.”
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He says one challenge to renewable energy includes unreliability and energy storage.
“Renewable energy is intermittent,” McClanahan said. “So when the wind is not blowing, or the sun’s not shining, you’re not producing energy, and that creates reliability concerns.”
Another challenge is energy storage.
“Renewable energy doesn’t have adequate energy storage yet,” McClanahan said. “So there’s a lot of different competing technologies for battery storage. The winner there has not yet been determined, and most of that bad air energy storage through batteries is a four-hour duration on batteries. That will not replace a coal or gas unit that could backup renewable energy. They’re working on longer-duration energy storage devices, but that’s still a ways off. We’re just not ready to fully convert to renewables.”
Also, he says some renewables take up land.
“We’re starting to see landowner push back on renewable facilities or the transmission assets that are needed to support those renewables,” McClanahan said.
He says he expects renewable energy to grow in Kansas, but the rate is unknown.
“It’s going to just depend on how quickly the technology develops,” McClanahan said. “And until that technology develops, we are going to have to keep a careful eye on our reliability and just how much renewables we can put into the system. I think people assume that renewables are the answer to environmental issues, and they don’t see necessarily see why there’s such a delay in getting to renewables, but it’s an extremely complex engineering issue within the overall electrical grid that we have to be very cautious about. So, you know, renewables make a lot of sense so long as you can rely on them. Right now, that is just not possible without some sort of dispatchable energy to back it up.”
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