OVERLAND PARK, Kansas — Nearly 70 years ago in a newly formed suburb of Kansas City, Kansas City Power & Light Co. built what it thought was a vision of the future — an all-electric home full of the latest technology.
“It was advertised as the lazy man’s paradise,” said Johnson County Museum curator Andrew Gustafson.
The house was a showpiece meant to sell electricity and the prospect of an all-electric future. It had outlets every few feet, buttons in the bedroom could turn on and off lights throughout the house, and it even had a fireplace, fake of course, powered by an electrical motor that simulated the sights and sounds of a crackling fire.
“So flick of the switch and your television appears,” Gustafson said. “It’s not hooked up now, but it originally would have turned on, as well, after that painting goes back.”
The TV behind the painting gimmick feels dated now, but another, less sexy feature of the home is even more relevant today: an electric heat pump.
At the time, heat pumps were basically unheard of. Today, they’re seen as a way to eliminate the need for natural gas and the climate warming emissions that come with it.
In many ways, Kansas has been a leader in clean energy development since that time. Most obviously, it’s harvested the low-hanging fruit: wind. The open plains also make massive solar energy farms a real possibility.
But other states are catching up and Kansas is one of only a handful of states without an energy plan. Some people think that’s a big mistake.
“There are opportunities there, but if they’re going to compete with neighboring states that have similar endowments — similar wind quality, similar solar quality, maybe a little bit closer to the cities — they’re going to have to probably take proactive steps to be as attractive as possible,” said Jesse Jenkins, a researcher at the Andlinger Center for Energy and Environment at Princeton University.
He recently helped craft some guidelines for getting the U.S. to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
The models don’t predict what will happen, but they offer potential pathways the country could follow to hit that target.
The suggestions focus on plans for generating energy where it’s cheapest. Wind from the Great Plains, solar energy from the Southwest and so on. In several scenarios, Kansas lags behind states like Missouri and Iowa which are closer to energy hungry population centers.
But Jenkins said that’s where state policies, goals and incentives come in. Kansas, with its abundant wind, solar and agricultural resources, could play a larger role and retool itself for the new energy economy.
Except … Kansas doesn’t have any plan. And it far exceeded the only goal it ever had — 20% renewable energy by 2020.
“A plan can show people outside the state that, ‘Hey, we’re serious about this,’” State Rep. Mark Schreiber, a Republican from Emporia, said. “We want to be part of this transition.”
