PUC Promotes Distributed Power Generation, Clean Air, Clarity Online

Darn near had to invoke open meetings laws here yesterday: South Dakota Public Utilities Commissioner Dusty Johnson dropped by to boost small wind and distributed generation (read more on the PUC's Small Renewable Energy Initiative... and Russ, you'd better be voting for this!).

Commissioner Steve Kolbeck very generously shared his time (and studiously followed the comment nymity policy!) to explain his comment about how Big Stone II could have led to a net decrease in air pollution around Big Stone Lake and the Whetstone Valley. Evidently the Big Stone II backers were voluntarily offering to upgrade Big Stone I to win regulatory support for the new coal plant. If that's the case (and Minnesota Clean Water Action wasn't convinced), I'm surprised that the BSII artists didn't make bigger hay of that point in their press to persuade us hippies that BSII would indeed have been good for the earth.

Of course, now that BSII is dead, Otter Tail, MDU, and Northwestern could still carry out those upgrades and really clean up the air around Big Stone.

Now if we could just get Commissioner Hanson to drop by, we'd have a full house!

PUC's Kolbeck Misplaces Negative Sign, Thinks Coal Makes Air Cleaner

PUC Commissioner Steve Kolbeck apparently does math with imaginary numbers:

Steve Kolbeck, vice chairman of South Dakota's Public Utilities Commission, said construction of Big Stone II and improvements to the nearby power plant would have cut total pollution from the site while greatly increasing its output.

"If we could have gotten it built ... we could have actually made the air cleaner up there," Kolbeck said" [Dale Wetzel, "Developers Abandon Plan for Big Stone II Power Plant," AP via Winona Daily News, 2009.11.03].

Help me out: building a coal-fired plant that would have pumped out four million tons of carbon dioxide a year, would have made the air cleaner? The two Minnesota administrative judges who ruled against building the power lines to Big Stone II (and whom the Minnesota PUC amazingly ignored) found the new coal plant would have emitted as much CO₂ as all of the cars and trucks in South Dakota. And CO₂ makes up only 10%–12% of the crap coming out of a coal plant smokestack (fly ash and mercury anyone?).

Yikes—next Commissioner Kolbeck will be telling farmers that the Keystone oil pipelines will make their groundwater safer.