ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
As Seward County commissioners continued to question how a wind energy project would benefit the county, an attorney with the law firm representing Invenergy was brought into the picture at Monday’s special meeting.
Alan Anderson with the Polsinelli Law Firm said with 24 years of project history, much is now known about how wind energy works.
“We work for most of the wind companies in Kansas, and I’ve worked personally on most them and certainly studied the area in depth on how it works,” he said.
Anderson said agreements such as those presented Monday are tried and true.
“We can make adjustments to these if you run into areas of concern,” he said. “That’s what this process is for. We do a lot to make sure they work for counties.”
Anderson answered commissioners concerns about how a wind farm project would benefit the county.
“You let your constituents use their property as they deem most economically fit,” he said. “We need to make sure it’s cited safely and properly, and we know how to do that. Your constituents, people who live here or own property here get to use their land for an economic purpose. That’s how we participate in the free market and capitalism. They’re compensated for that. Those dollars flow through the community and create great benefit within that.”
Anderson emphasized while other sources of energy have a 10-year property tax exemption, this is not the same case with wind energy.
“You’ve probably heard stories about the new gas plants going online,” he said. “Those have a 10-year property tax exemption. If there was going to be a new coal plant, it has a new 10-year exemption. That puts it on par. It’s nothing new or special for renewables.”
Anderson said personal property tax starts at the 10th year, and after that, a donation goes into place.
“You have sales tax,” he said. “This is a big construction project. You have a lot of those dollars flowing through community as part of that. You’ll have the sales tax, and you’ll have all the companies that work and will support an operating project.”
Anderson said energy from local turbines would be injected into a grid in the region.
“It’s more low cost energy into the grid,” he said. “It’s simply supply and demand. We put more low cost energy into supply, and that helps.”
Anderson said there is a nationwide need for energy, and having wind energy in Seward County would help.
“It’s an all-the-above strategy,” he said. “With most companies, renewables are a part of that. Natural gas is part of that. There’s some nuclear that’s part of that. We’re doing all of those. We need all of that. More of this initial low cost energy helps people locally too.”
Anderson said with multiple projects in multiple counties, Invenergy knows wind energy works.
“Down the road in Ford County, they have now 11 or 12 operating projects, and we know that it works great for those communities,” he said.
Commission Chairman Scott Carr said many landowners worry about decommissioning with wind energy.
“We don’t want to get like the oil field and have all these thousands of abandoned wells,” he said.
Anderson said this is what is great about the agreements between companies and counties.
“What it has is the protocol for when they have to come down, and there are processes,” he said. “It states when that needs to take place. We put a bond in place so if we didn’t do it for some reason, you have a bond or letter of credit in place to take care of it yourself. You’d hire the same contractors, and you could do it.”
Anderson said agreements also county officials to go to constituents with both documents and security in place to take care of roads.
“They’ll be put back in place, and we know because we’ll have security in place to do it if it doesn’t work,” he said.
Commission Vice Chair Tammy Sutherland-Abbott said the amount of questions asked at Monday’s meeting were due to the county’s responsibility to its taxpayers.
“If it affects one area that benefits from it, we have to make sure there are no expenses or that the rest of the county pays for that,” she said.
Anderson said in addition to money from tax revenues, Invenergy would pay for many expenses.
“When the dollars come in, you can decide where and how those are used as you see fit, but from a cost and expense, it’s not something that puts a burden onto the county,” he said.
Commissioner Presephoni Fuller asked what would happen should Invenergy go bankrupt or change ownership.
“Where are we in that game?” she said.
Anderson said the agreements presented at Monday’s meeting are meant to protect against such a scenario.
“It hasn’t taken place, but let’s say it did,” he said. “We have security in place. If we go away for some reason, go bankrupt, whatever it is, you can draw upon the security to decommission and take everything down.”
Anderson likewise was asked about lighting on turbines to help aircrafts see towers. He said state legislation has been passed requiring aircraft detection lighting systems to be put on all new projects.
In that same vein, Commissioner Todd Stanton asked what a project would do for crop dusting in the northeast corner of Seward County, the area in which the project is planned.
Anderson said companies such as Invenergy work with local crop dusters.
“We have the same issue in all the projects, and for the participants in the project, the biggest part of that is they want to continue to have fields sprayed,” he said. “I’ve worked with the head of the crop dusters association, and they’ve worked with crop dusters.”
Anderson said landowners are notified of towers being constructed, and they will know when that is being done.
“If they’re spraying, the project operational team can coordinate with a sprayer if they want them turned off during the period of spraying,” he said. “They turn the turbines off so they’re not moving, and they spray.”
