For visitors walking the boardwalks at Fort Larned, a 16-decade-old garrison, it can be easy to pretend that you’ve entered a different time.
The scene is so lacking in evidence of the 21st century that, hearing footsteps on the boardwalk, you’d almost expect to see 19th century troopers chowing down at the mess or executing cavalry commands. Feel the Kansas wind whip body and soul, and you know they felt it too.
Part of the beauty of the old fort is that visitors can turn back time and see some of the sights and sounds that travelers along the Santa Fe Trail experienced nearly two centuries before them.
Ever since the fort became a unit of the National Park System – in August of 1964 – great pains have been taken to preserve and restore the fort’s look and feel.
But that may soon be changing.
An 800-mile high-voltage transmission line is expected to be built, with construction beginning in 2024, from Ford County east through Kansas, Missouri and Illinois, ending in Indiana. Nearly half the mileage of the Grain Belt Express will traverse Kansas. Although negotiations are still ongoing, the power line is expected to be visible from the western edge of the fort.
The four-legged, metal towers carrying the lines will range in height from 130 to 160 feet, according to Brad Pnazek, vice president of transmission development for Invenergy, the company building the line.
By comparison, typical rural grain elevators – long considered the skyscrapers of Kansas – are 90-feet tall.
Yet Kristin Keith, president of the Fort Larned Old Guard, an auxiliary group at the fort, is concerned the line may detract from the character of the nation’s premier Indian Wars-era fort.
“If you are at the fort as a tourist – definitely as a historian – you are wanting an authentic view and experience what life was like in the 1860s,” Keith says. “But then, you look out and see these huge power lines and, you know, it diminishes your experience. So, that’s where we are.
“They put in these power lines and what’s next?
“We have a good thing out at Fort Larned. It’s one of the most well-preserved forts on the frontier and in the West. How do you protect that?”
The Kansas Corporation Commission approved building the project in two phases this past June, which, according to Dia Kuykendall of Invenergy, will allow Kansans to see economic benefits sooner.
The first phase is from Kansas to the Missouri interconnection point. The proposal is expected to increase capacity on the line by 25 percent to 5,000 megawatts, with a total project investment of approximately $7 billion.
The proposed route is 1.7 miles west of the National Historic Site and may be visible, perhaps far more visible than a current transmission line, from the western boundary of the fort.
Grain Belt Express is working with the National Park Service and conducting an analysis to assess potential visual impacts.
It’s hardly the only way that renewable energy is reshaping the horizon in central Kansas.
Cheyenne Bottoms, a designated Wetland of International Importance and key stopping point for migrating birds along the Central Flyway, is located about 50 miles northeast of the fort. Invenergy officials say their project should have no direct or indirect impacts on the wildlife area and preserve.
A 1,500-acre, $300 million solar farm proposed by a Spanish company, Acciona Energy, located even closer to Cheyenne Bottoms is generating even more local opposition. This past spring, the Barton County Commission adopted a temporary ban on solar farms in an effort to buy time to revamp the county’s zoning regulations.
It’s indicative of just how much green-energy projects have some conservationists concerned that the lines may be a threat to birds, in particular endangered whooping cranes that tend to loaf in area fields on their migrations.
“These birds are low fliers,” says Dan Witt, a photographer and retired urologist who often drives the Bottoms two to three times a week. “They fly into barbed-wire fences. But when they are landing and taking off, they are very clumsy and not very agile. … By the time they realize there is trouble, they’ve already crashed into them and killed or damaged themselves.”
Witt is specifically opposed to the solar panel project proposed around Cheyenne Bottoms and has collected a petition with more than 15,000 signatures opposing the project.
“We must protect the land and birds and critters that live in our area that can’t speak for themselves,” Witt wrote in a column called “Marsh Musings,” published in the Great Bend Tribune this past spring. “If we lose them, we lose a huge part of our personal identity – I don’t want to do that.”
Representatives of Acciona could not be reached for comment. Witt says the project is, for now, no threat to Cheyenne Bottoms or the Quivira National Wildlife Refuge. He recently attended a meeting of the Kansas Wildlife and Parks Commission to express his opposition. He and other critics of the plan are talking with their local planning and zoning commissions and county governments in advance of any proposal being considered.
“There will be trouble if they come close to a wetland,” says Witt, because of all the advocates for wildlife habitat.
The projects in central Kansas are just two examples of communities finding themselves at odds over the future of landscapes. Amid vocal opposition last year, Johnson and Douglas counties approved regulations allowing the construction of what’s called “the largest utility-scale solar farm in Kansas.”
Sedgwick County, in south-central Kansas, recently passed a moratorium on commercial-scale solar projects in unincorporated areas. That’s given the county time to study any potential new regulations while debate simmers over a proposal from Invenergy for a 103-megawatt solar farm between Maize and Colwich.
But the Grain Belt Express is a good example of how a national shift to renewable energy – crucial to reducing the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels and reducing the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change – has fueled opposition to landscape transformation. That’s despite the fact that these projects can offer landowners a new source of income, economic development to communities, along with general environmental benefits.
The landscape, namely the wide-open horizons in rural areas that have long been part of Kansas’ identity, is undergoing change. It’s tough to keep modernity – particularly well-financed modernity – at bay.
The green energy being generated across the Flint Hills, the Smoky Hills, the Gyp Hills and the Red Hills means planting acres of twirling wind turbines with their flashing red lights. (It’s a phenomenon grating enough that the Kansas Legislature adopted a law this session designed to mitigate the blinks.)
“It’s not just the horizon I have a concern with,” says Jim Gray, a fifth-generation Kansan who lives in Geneseo and whose great-grandmother was Euphemia Cody Gray, a cousin to Buffalo Bill Cody. Although none of the projects affect Gray’s land, he’s concerned about what they may be doing to Kansas’ landscape. “I have a concern with the native grasses and the dwindling resources of our native grassland and the habitat and biodiversity that goes with it. You put up these towers and turbines, and you just change the natural ecology of the surrounding system so that it ceases to be what it was meant to be.
“I look at the horizon and I see these wind towers and transmission lines. I recognize that they are here because of this march of technology, this advancement of so-called civilization. But then, what does it really mean to be civilized? It probably goes beyond words to explain the effect it has upon us to blot out that big open horizon that gives us a sense we can do anything. The Kansas horizon goes beyond us. It inspires and gives us a sense of who we are. … So, that’s what changes.”
Harnessing the power
The changes are being wrought, in part, because one natural resource – the state’s bounty of wind and sun – have become money factories at a time when another resource – the often-dismissed minimalist aesthetics of the Plains – brings less tangible economic value to the equation.
Most Kansans know the wind is constant and has been the legacy of Kansas at least since the pre-Columbian era.
“Kansas is herself again,” a Kansas correspondent wrote in 1880 in The Salina Journal. “The wind blows and the dust and sand flies, but no rain descends. A newcomer asked one of our fellow townsmen if it always blew this way in Kansas. He replied that there were perhaps two or three days during the year that it did not.”
We are a state of skywatchers. Fortunes can be made and lost by Kansas weather.
At times, the scent of rain on a spring day becomes a gambling fix. To understand what’s at stake, you only have to look into the faces of Kansas wheat farmers when fields are golden, ready to be harvested, as dark, green storm clouds march across the horizon.
It’s hard to put a price, though, on a view. Wind, on the other hand, is becoming increasingly crucial to the state’s economy. Consider these factoids from the U.S. Energy Information Administration:
- Wind surpassed coal in 2019 to become the largest source of electricity in Kansas.
- Wind accounted for 47% of the state’s total net generation in 2022.
- Coal produced 32% of the state’s net energy that year, with a nuclear power plant contributing 14% and gas-fired plants contributing 6%. (The rest of Kansas’s electricity generation comes from a group of sources that include petroleum liquids, solar energy, biomass and hydroelectric power.)
For now, Kansas ranks fourth in the nation in wind power.
“Since 2016, 400 new turbines have gone up in Kansas with rotor hubs taller than the Statue of Liberty. … The state now has nearly 4,000 turbines, with hubs between 210 and 400 feet high,” according to a news report on March 1 by Celia Llopis-Jepsen for KCUR-FM, Kansas City’s National Public Radio affiliate.
But it’s been a struggle to build the transmission lines to enable green-energy producing states to export power. And those lines are needed if the nation is going to meet its goal to decarbonize by 2050, according to research by Princeton University.
“So, the Grain Belt Express Project has been around going on more than a decade or so,” Pnazek says. “We at Invenergy believe Grain Belt Express is critically important to Kansas families and businesses. By harnessing one of the Midwest’s greatest domestic energy sources, southwest Kansas’ wind power, we can greatly improve the reliability of the electric grid, while helping Kansas families and businesses that are facing rising energy costs. We also believe our country’s national security is strengthened when we increase our domestic energy supply to become more energy independent.”
Pnazek says it is anticipated that building the Grain Belt Express will create 19,350 construction jobs in Kansas.
“This is a multistate, interregional project,” Pnazek says. “So, we are not just getting approvals from state officials in Kansas, but also in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. Why Kansas? The abundance of wind and solar resources that we find in southwest Kansas, in particular. The project has a converter station, which is one of the end points in Ford County. The wind blows strong out there and regularly.”
Indeed, according to the website weatherstationadvisor.com, Dodge City is the windiest city in the nation, clocking in with an average wind speed of 13.1 mph. April is its windiest month with August being the calmest.
“The thesis behind the Grain Belt Express is to unleash that abundant energy from that area to serve other markets that are looking for affordable, reliable, renewable power,” Pnazek says. “So, the number of megawatts over the number of miles transported, Grain Belt is at the top of the list here in the U.S. That power gets transmitted across the rest of Kansas, over the river into Missouri and then to another converter station in Missouri … and then across the Mighty Mississippi into Illinois and then on to Indiana.”
So, what does Kansas get out of this?
Witt says more wind energy will undoubtedly make some people richer.
But the project’s corporate officials say their project will also help stabilize rural economies, particularly businesses that might not be directly affected by the lines – while strengthening the nation’s power grid.
“It’s not just the transmission line itself, but the generating assets and as much as $8.1 billion of capital investments in Kansas,” Pnazek says. “Kansas is one of those abundant producers – so that comes back and benefits Kansas landowners and Kansas electrical providers in that affordable energy gets moved over and suppresses the cost of energy across all these regions.”
Seventy percent of the nation’s power grid, Pnazek says, has transmission lines that are 25 years or older.
“Just like an old piece of farm equipment or a car, you need to keep upgrading and updating things as they go on,” he says. “We are seeing that high-voltage direct-current system that we are using for Grain Belt Express is an efficient way to move power across an 800-mile stretch of property.”
‘A big number’
Acquiring the land is about 80% complete, Pnazek says. Negotiations are continuing.
“We acquired this project in 2019,” he says. “We have had members of our project team out talking with landowners along the 530 miles that constitute Phase One of the project, which is Kansas and Missouri. Eighty-seven percent of the miles have been acquired with voluntary easements – the ones that have been negotiated in good faith between us and the landowners.
“With the approval of the KCC (Kansas Corporation Commission), they do grant us the ability to use condemnation for eminent domain purposes. We have had the need to file petitions on a dozen or so properties. But again, that’s a real small percentage of the 1,300 to 1,400 landowners that we’re dealing with. I think that goes to show the kind of effort we are going to, to build relationships with the landowners.”
Consensus building has been attempted through household-by-household negotiations with landowners, Pnazek says.
“It’s a lot of cups of coffee,” Pnazek says. “You will sit at family tables and meet people where they are at – and help them understand our project as well as understanding their needs. I think we are going above and beyond what the standard utility processes have been in setting transmission lines in the past. It is most impactful on landowners. We are putting money in people’s pockets. We are going above and beyond industry norms on compensation. We are paying 110% of the fair market value for the easements whereas previous utilities might pay 90%. And we are making payments for the tower structures that are being located on people’s property.”
In some cases, Pnazek says, it has meant negotiating over what some landowners see as needs. It has sometimes meant erecting new gates and making sure gates are locked properly and that both parties have keys.
“There’s folks that are never going to come to agreement with us. It’s their right to feel that way. And I guess that’s why when it comes to approvals of projects like this, the KCC grants us the ability of eminent domain.”
“I think $8.1 billion is a big number,” Pnazek says. “Sometimes it is easy for developers to kind of throw around big numbers. But I think what it comes back to is the direct payments to landowners. These easements, these voluntary easements are going to put money in their pockets.”
Beyond that, Pnazek says, the project is a boost to the local economies with more money spent at gas stations, restaurants and suppliers.
Going against the wind
But will the changes in the horizon reduce the opportunities Kansans have to experience their history?
At Fort Larned, some of the staff hope concessions can be made to honor the fort’s importance to the nation’s history.
“We are still early in the process,” says Kevin Eads, the fort’s superintendent. “Fort Larned is a National Historic Landmark as well as a unit of the National Park Service. So, those things have to be taken into account. We are looking at the visual – the potential for visual impacts to the cultural landscape and how that will affect the park and our national designation.
“Our staff has worked really hard to preserve the fort, circa 1868. Whenever you come into the park, you don’t have the typical signs and things showing – because you are going back in time, whenever you walk into the park.”
The fort and Grain Belt are working on an environmental impact statement.
At the April board meeting of the Fort Larned Old Guard, George Elmore, chief ranger at the fort, says most visitors to the fort will have their backs to the transmission line once they park in the fort’s parking lot and walk across a bridge to the fort. But the transmission line will still be visible – mostly as the visitors return to their vehicles.
For visitors during the summer months, the leaves on trees by the Pawnee Fork will block much of the westward view. Winter visitors will see the full impact of the transmission line, Elmore says.
Even so, there are the poets and free spirits who question what this new horizon is bringing to Kansas.
Gray looks at all these new projects with an eyebrow half-raised.
“Maybe I am optimistic, but I honestly think that we’re moving towards a new era,” Gray says, “in which we will all self-produce our own electricity. I think that this idea of these companies supplying our energy is short-sighted.“
Gray thinks solar and wind development is still in its infancy.
“I think we are seeing the dawning of a new age. They are developing solar panels to the extent that they look like shingles on your house. Transmission lines and even wind towers – I can see them all becoming obsolete.”
So, as he looks across the horizon, Gray says, he remembers growing up around Geneseo six decades ago and seeing oil derricks filling the horizon.
“I was just a kid when oil was developed and at every location, they had put up a steel derrick and when you drove through the countryside, your horizon was interrupted by hundreds of steel derricks,” Gray says. “Well, as time went on that changed, and all the derricks were taken down and the horizon opened again.
Gray envisions a future where history might repeat itself, this time with wind instead of oil. If it comes to pass, Gray imagines, “the horizon will just open up again.”
Until then, though, Kansas will continue navigating a delicate balance of competing values – the expansion of renewable energy, the openness of the horizon, the rights of landowners and economic growth. It’s not a new story, but certainly a new chapter.
A version of this article appears in the Fall 2023 issue of The Journal, a publication of the Kansas Leadership Center. To learn more about KLC, visit http://kansasleadershipcenter.org. Order your copy of the magazine at the KLC Store or subscribe to the print edition.
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