EMILY GERTZ/© SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

HOLCOMB, Kans.—Kyle Nelson points upward to show off the six-story-high main boiler of Holcomb Station. The 370-megawatt coal-fired power plant sits on the rolling prairie of southwestern Kansas just a few miles from the small town of Holcomb, population 2,100, roughly 40 miles (65 kilometers) east of the Colorado border. Enormous metal pipes crisscross far overhead in a facility where the temperature is a little too hot to ignore, and the machinery's din is deafening.

Nelson, a senior vice president and chief operating officer at Sunflower Electric Power Corp. unhooks a heavy latch and swings opens a large metal hatch to reveal the 26-year-old plant's fiery heart: a furnace where coal-fueled flames burning nonstop at about 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,370 degrees Celsius) heat a 55,000-gallon (208,200-liter) boiler to produce 2,400 pounds per square inch (170 kilograms per square centimeter) of high-pressure steam. The hulking gray metal turbine that converts the steam into electricity, which will energize the aging high-power transmission lines of western Kansas, recalls the size and streamlined form of a 1930 steam locomotive.

"I just want to build power plants to meet system need," says Nelson, who notes that his analysis of  the energy needs of western and central Kansas found that even the most energy-efficient program won't meet the demand that will grow over the next several decades. So, he wants to build two new 700-megawatt coal-fired plants on the site.

In early May, Sunflower Electric, a cooperative of six utilities serving around 400,000 customers, got its wish—or at least part of it: Newly sworn in Gov. Mark Parkinson (D) announced a compromise with the utility that will allow it to build one new 895-megawatt coal-fired plant. That was only after two years of fighting with the state's executive branch to expand its Holcomb operation—plans vetoed three times in 2008 and once in 2009 by then-Governor Kathleen Sebelius (D).

The confrontation catapulted Kansas and Sunflower onto the front lines of the national debate about ending the nation's dependence on coal-fired power.

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No plumes of black smoke float from the Holcomb Station's smokestack into the wide-open Kansas sky, as much of the toxic ash by-products from burning the coal (over 1.5 million tons a year) are scrubbed from the plant's emissions and stored in nearby containment ponds. But Holcomb does emit 1.5 million to 1.7 million tons of carbon dioxide per annum—the invisible greenhouse gas that is the leading driver of human-propelled global warming. This is one of the main reasons many—including Sebelius—opposed the two coal-fired plants, which would have generated more than 11 million tons a year of CO2.

The proposed 895-megawatt plant will create around seven million tons of CO2, according to Stephanie Cole, a Kansas City, Kans.–based campaigner with the Sierra Club. Kansas will be responsible for all that CO2, while getting less than a quarter of the power generated by the plant The rest of the power will go to two power wholesalers helping to co-finance the Holcomb expansion: Colorado's Tri-State Generation and Transmission, which supplies power to 44 electrical cooperatives in Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico and Wyoming; and Texas-based Golden Spread Electric Cooperative, which serves 16 electrical cooperatives in Texas and the Oklahoma panhandle.

About a year ago, Sunflower Electric refused to take Gov. Sebelius up on a very similar compromise: building a 660-megawatt coal-fired plant that would provide power exclusively to Kansans while creating less of a CO2 load on the state, along with increasing the company's total wind power capacity to 20 percent. Instead the company challenged an earlier air-quality permit denial in state court, and sued the Sebelius administration last November in federal court. (The judge in the federal case is considering a motion by the defendants to dismiss the case; Clare Gustin, a Sunflower vice president, says the company will withdraw the federal lawsuit when it receives an air quality permit from the state to build the new plant.)