Keep lights on as Washington transitions to clean power

A January cold snap that strained the Pacific Northwest electricity grid also serves as a cautionary tale for its future. With temperatures in the teens, power utilities across Washington struggled to cover spiking demand to keep the lights on. Puget Sound Energy, the state’s largest utility, even asked its customers to turn down thermostats and limit hot water use to conserve power.

Utilities relied on the state’s on-demand sources of generation, including hydroelectric dams, natural gas- and coal-powered plants, which can be turned up or on, depending upon need. Declaring what’s known as a “reliability emergency,” utilities also had to import thousands of megawatts of electricity from the wider western U.S. and Canadian power grids to stave off the threat of blackouts, according to a recent analysis by a wholesale electricity provider.

Wind and solar farms, meanwhile, helped little as a largely breezeless low-pressure system moved across the state. The intermittent generation of renewable sources like these — that aren’t dams — is a hard truth of climate goals: The Northwest power grid’s transformation to 100% clean energy is not achievable without further investments and the development of carbon-free, on-demand electricity.

When utilities lack the supply to meet ratepayers’ demands, blackouts are the result. They most often occur when that demand peaks: a summer heat wave, like California suffered in August 2020, or a winter storm, such as the one that befell Texas in February 2021. In January’s blast of arctic air, Bonneville Power Administration — the Northwest’s largest provider of power to Washington — hit its largest output of electricity since 1990. BPA sells electricity from 31 dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers and a nuclear power plant near the Tri-Cities. On Jan. 13, its portfolio produced a peak of 11,400 megawatts. By comparison, BPA has been producing an average of around 7,000 megawatts to meet its load this month.

Through this monumental transformation to clean energy, Northwest leaders and power planners must ensure the grid remains reliable as greenhouse gas-emitting sources are powered down and renewables are added. Recently, U.S. Sen. Patty Murray announced $6 million in federal money for Washington to help improve electrical grid infrastructure planning. Washington State University will develop planning tools to manage uncertainties in power grids across the state, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will provide analysis to increase renewable-resource integration into Washington’s power grid.

While federal and state leaders work toward meeting greenhouse gas-reduction targets, they need to heed warnings from utilities and grid operators concerned about maintaining enough generation sources to keep the lights on 24/7.

The Biden administration is pursuing a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035; in Washington, the 2019 Clean Energy Transformation Act mandates electricity production in the state to be free of carbon emissions by 2045. For that to happen, carbon-free sources of on-demand generation need to be fully engineered, developed and deployed on the grid.

There are prospects on the horizon. The Bill Gates-backed TerraPower plans to split atoms in small nuclear reactors. Utilities are investing in large battery storage near residential areas, which can charge when power demand is low and then deploy it when demand is high. Renewable hydrogen could fuel plants that today run on natural gas. All those, and other potential solutions, need time and support to mature.

Regulators must also accelerate reviews of projects that put clean power on the grid and prioritize the urgency of reliability. Retired U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Bremerton, recently called out the Washington Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council, a clearinghouse for energy projects involving state agencies, saying it needs to speed up and become a “catalyst for change toward a clean energy economy.

“The only way to stop burning carbon is to build new clean energy projects at an unprecedented scale and scope in every corner of Washington,” Dicks wrote in a recent Seattle Times Op-Ed.

While the Northwest benefits from clean power dams, they pose a threat to endangered salmon species. A recent state report recommended four Snake River dams be breached for this reason, but only if their benefits can be replaced. During last year’s drought, the Columbia and Snake river dams generated 23% less electricity, the Energy Department reported.

Without another long-term, on-demand generation solution, the Northwest grid could fall into a vicious circle: Extreme weather exacerbated by climate change drives high demand that local utilities must meet by purchasing or turning on their own carbon-emitting sources like natural gas. Even Grant County PUD in Central Washington, rich in hydroelectric power, needed to purchase power from sources outside the state to weather January’s cold.

Concurrently, demand on the power grid is surging — be it the upswing in electric car purchases, heat pumps or the growth of AI-powering data centers. The Northwest needs roughly 4,000 megawatts of additional generation, about 20% of the current output, to keep pace over the next five years, according to a 2023 forecast by the Pacific Northwest Utilities Conference Committee.

Meanwhile, Washington has mandated the reduction of all carbon sources to meet its climate goals. Under CETA, 23 natural gas power plants now providing up to 4,000 megawatts of power must close or transition to a clean fuel source by 2045. Washington’s final coal plant, in Centralia, will shut down next year.

“We’re shutting down plants right now in anticipation of new carbon-free generation technologies that haven’t yet come to fruition,” said Kurt Miller, director of the Northwest Public Power Association. “If we’re wrong about this, it puts people at risk, either through higher energy costs, or even the prospect of blackouts.”

State lawmakers and regulators must not lose sight of the threat to grid reliability. That doesn’t mean backing away from the challenge of climate change but the acknowledgment that a complete transformation of the electricity grid will require a commitment to funding new sources of generation that are still years from grid deployment.