"Today I'm calling for the United States to create a Great Plains Wind Authority."

Explaining the extraordinary relationship Kansas has with wind, "Winds have destroyed our towns with one powerful breath, and then dropped the essence of life - rain - on our crops with the next. These winds have defined the immense sense of freedom in our prairies and grasslands. In fact, our state's very name recalls this blustery heritage as the Kansai, or the People of the South Wind, who once roamed this land," he said.

Kansas faces an extraordinary opportunity to reap benefit from the winds; ranked third in United States for wind energy, with an average estimated wind energy potential of 138,000 megawatts of power or roughly the equivalent of 154 of the coal-fired plants.

"We must be careful to build wind farms where they will be least harmful to our remaining native prairie grasses and to the wildlife that lives there."

Schollenberger pointed out, while wind power currently provides about one percent of total U.S. electricity, enough to serve 4.5 million households, "we must not make the environmental mistakes of the past where the careless stripping of top soil for coal brought damage to the land."

Proponents of wind energy, project a supply as much as twenty percent of America's electricity usage in a couple of decades.

This will not happen without years of careful planning and implementation. To deliver this wind power to customers in Kansas and around the country efficiently, our power transmission lines will need a major upgrade. Today's wind energy is delivered by cobbled together low-voltage, inefficient power lines. The current low-voltage power lines limit the number of wind farms Kansas can build. The problem is not limited to the state of Kansas. Nationally, power grids have become mishmash, due largely to the manner in which they were built: to serve the needs of individual power utilities. In this haphazard system, high-powered lines serve major population centers on the East and West coasts.

Today most wind energy generated by Kansas' current wind farms is consumed in the immediate region with literally no way to ship the power generated to where it needs to go, the southern and southeastern United States.

Schollenberger reminded county residents "throughout history, we Democrats have traditionally supported public improvements, from building canals to further trade with the East, to building roads that opened settlement in the West. Franklin Roosevelt promoted legislation that created the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The TVA tamed rivers, created jobs, and brought electric power to impoverished Appalachian farmers. Franklin Roosevelt promoted plans to build the Hoover Dam, which opened vast supplies of water to California farmers and electrical power to southern California."

Schollenberger called for a similar project to help Kansas residents realize the potential to provide cheap, clean, renewable wind energy.

The Great Plains Wind Authority, like the TVA, would be a quasi-governmental agency with the power and funding to cut through red tape, allowing for the building of high-voltage transmission lines.

Red tape and politics, Schollenberger said, is currently holding up plans to build a $800 million, 765,000 volt line, the highest capacity transmission line of its kind, from Spearville (site of a wind farm in southwest Kansas), and Wichita, south to the Oklahoma border.

"In its wake would follow a new industry of highly skilled workers that will provide Kansans with valuable, talented, and long-term employment. Jobs that cannot be outsourced, because Kansas wind does not blow overseas," he said.

The Great Plains Wind Authority will ensure the sensible and consistent development of wind farms throughout the region.

Currently, major energy transmission projects such as those needed in Kansas, require approval by the Southwest Power Pool, which regulates energy transmission in all of Kansas, Oklahoma, parts of western Texas, eastern Arkansas, and Mississippi.

The broad geographic diversity of the Southwest Power Pool currently places the Midwest wind power industry at the mercy of power producers in other states. The creation of the Great Plains Wind Authority will give our wind power producers a co-equal role with other power producers, and will be an important source of funding, needed to modernize our power transmission infrastructure. It will be a top priority of mine in the U.S. Senate.