According to a new report released by the Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies, 8,750 new jobs and $1.7 billion dollars in economic activity can be generated in central and eastern Kentucky via those sustainable “green-economy” alternative-energy jobs Your President is always babbling about. However, the Eastern Kentucky Power Cooperative (EKPC) holds dominion over this 87-county area, and with their current intention of building a new coal-fired power plant — dubbed, somewhat lacklusterly, Smith-1 — it appears doubtful, at the moment, that even when faced with cold hard facts to the contrary they’ll even bother changing course.
Consider a few of the report’s findings:
Besides creating a greater number of sorely-needed jobs, the energy efficiency and renewable energy portfolio in the Ochs Center report has a projected cost of $62.10 per megawatt hour, compared to most recent cost estimate for the Smith plant of $74.73 per megawatt hour.
Clean energy jobs could be realized much more quickly than jobs from the Smith plant, since plant construction may be years away.
Be that as it may, the chief proponents of Smith-1 weren’t impressed.
“My impression is that we are and always have been leaders of energy efficiency in this state,” said Kevin Osborne of the EKPC. “We believe that the answer to the challenges in energy are to have a balanced approach, and that includes renewable sources as well as fossil fuels.”
Osborne then disputed the report’s economic data: “I don’t know where they got their numbers from,” and specifically critiqued wind power as a source of renewable energy in this state. “Most of Kentucky is not good for wind production,” he began. “You need enough wind to make that feasible. [Kentucky doesn't] have adequate wind to make those units feasible in most locations. If you look at a map of the United States where wind is commercially attractive, there’s a little sliver on eastern Kentucky where that’s even feasible.”
All of which is true — except that nowhere does the Ochs report factor wind energy into its modeling; Oborne’s, then, is a straw-man argument.
“In our report, we specifically state that EKPC could attempt to allocate wind power,” said David Eichenthal, President/CEO of the Ochs Center. “But because we didn’t know where that power would come from — whether they would attempt to generate it in Kentucky or purchase it from elsewhere — we didn’t attribute any economic impact from wind power at all … so I’m not sure what [EKPC] is trying to prove here.”
Additionally, Eichenthal said that the type of economic activity generated by a less-concentrated, dispersed web of sustainable power plants (hydro, solar, thermal, etc.), across the EKPC region, results in a multiplier effect (more or less) that the building of Smith 1 will not generate. He cited a three-tiered economic impact of such a green approach: Direct impact (jobs’ salaries, people hired, money spent on local suppliers), indirect impact (buy enough supplies then the suppliers themselves expand) and induced impact (workers who can now afford to go out to dinner put tip money in servers’ pockets), all of it occurring in a cheaper, more affordable and less environmentally devestating package.
“We got our data form a variety of sources,” said Eichenthal. “For example, the projected costs and investment levels came from an organization called the U.S. Department of Energy. If EKPC wants to dispute these numbers, they can take it up with them.”