Angus Duncan

Duncan is former chair of the Northwest Conservation and Power Planning Council and a member of the WestTEC Regional Engagement Committee. He lives in Portland and central Oregon.

A Washington Post headline last March warned ominously: “Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power.”

Well, maybe.

Pacific Northwest utilities are nervous, anticipating more freezes and heat domes that stress an electricity infrastructure on which our livelihoods, and sometimes our lives, depend. They see demand increases doubling and maybe doubling again. They remind themselves of the 2021 Texas winter blackouts, that caused the deaths of at least 246 people – and possibly hundreds more.

There are solutions, in abundance. There’s ample wind and solar to meet our energy and climate needs. Developers are eager to build.

But there’s a problem: how to connect all that Great Plains wind and Southwest solar to Northwest homes and businesses.

Nationwide, says the federal Energy Department, we’ll need double today’s transmission capacity – the lines carrying electricity from power sources to homes – by 2035, and more by 2050, to meet rising demand (while offsetting coal and gas plant closings) with new connections to clean energy sources.

In the Northwest, this amounts to way more than a tweak to present transmission deployments. Fact is we’ve neglected transmission investments for years. While the Bonneville Power Administration, our largest regional grid operator, has upgraded many of its lines, since 1990 it has added fewer than 400 line-miles to its 15,000 mile high voltage system.

We don’t need just more miles of lines. We need a strategy for linking new resources and energy storage nodes to growing loads. We need more interconnectedness and more power exchanges across that grid to meet reliability and carbon emissions standards cost-effectively.

Trading power across the grid is nothing new. Our utilities have been doing it for years across BPA’s multi-state transmission grid. We’ve sent Northwest hydropower south to cool California’s hot summer days; they’ve returned the power to warm our colder winters. Lately, they’re sending us their over-generation of solar power at bargain prices.

In today’s grid, power needs tend to cluster, surging here and deflating there at different times. That diversity is a strength provided we can connect the waxing and waning clusters together. Think how lights turn on in evening hours first on the east coast, later in the west as darkness crosses time zones.

To continue leveraging these differences in supply and usage across all the western states, we’ll need more and larger transmission lines. We’ll need more – and more efficient – energy storage to leverage the mismatch between the hours that customers need power and when the wind blows or the sun shines. We need these capabilities urgently.

But there are challenges.

In the early days of electricity, we sited lines with little attention to environmental, cultural or community concerns. Today these lines must navigate an extensive web of accommodations and obstacles that have grown up to protect those (wholly legitimate) concerns. A new high-voltage power line can now take a dozen years or more to be approved when residents or other members of the public raise objections along the proposed route. We need to treat these concerns with due respect, but we also have to weigh local interests against the value of having an efficient, available, affordable, reliable – and timely – power system that also enables progress to a zero-carbon energy supply. If we fail to build these lines, we are choosing to feed our energy demand with existing dirty coal and gas.

From which threat is it more important to protect an endangered habitat: that new power line, or the climate change that will ensue if we fail to decarbonize? We’ll need to navigate between these outcomes to meet our need for more, cleaner electricity, faster.

Our first option should always be acting locally to minimize the need for new transmission; thus, adding solar to our rooftops and high efficiency heat pumps in our basements to heat water and to warm (and cool) our homes. We can turn our driveways into energy storage sites by plugging our electric vehicles into the grid to back up the local utility.

Our next option is to use the existing transmission system more efficiently by upgrading existing lines to carry more juice within the same physical footprint. Technology is giving us lines that can double or triple the throughput on a given link.

But make no mistake: we will need new long distance transmission lines. We need to protect community, cultural and natural values while moving decisions along at an accelerated pace, ensuring: that the proposed new lines are ones we need; that they sit as lightly as possibly on the landscape; and that the public is fully involved in the discussion of where they will go.

There’s another complication. As western utilities seek reliability, lower carbon and costs in a more integrated and unified west-wide grid, BPA may upend the effort by choosing instead to join a separate power market operated from Little Rock, Arkansas. That could split the west down the middle into two power markets and operators, sacrificing efficiency, value and effective access to renewable generation.

Such a lamentable choice makes it all the more necessary for Oregon to be working with other western states, and without delay, to address the transmission gap.

Two key efforts are underway in which Oregon and its utilities participate. The Western Transmission Expansion Coalition of utilities, states, stakeholders and others is developing 10- and 20-year transmission plans including near-term expansion steps. The Westwide Pathways Initiative, prompted by western states’ utility regulators, is standing up a multi-state market across which power surpluses and shortages can be traded efficiently.

Both these efforts are crucial to western electricity reliability and efficiency. Both need to proceed with urgency.

Electricity is at an inflection point globally and locally, a point that holds promise and worrying concerns in equal parts.

The “concerns” are: fossil fuels hang on too long and we’re deep in the climate soup anyway; or the fossil plants close while electricity demand is spiking and we’re unprepared.

The “promise” is of ample, reliable electricity free of greenhouse gases and climate peril and lower cost than the old fossil sources. It’s power we need for our home-heating, egg-frying, computer-activating, car-driving lives. Add data centers that service the Internet, enable online shopping, stream movies. Add tech manufacturing and even Bitcoin mining.

We can do this. Utilities and energy practitioners are seriously engaged. But it’s a real horserace between the worst outcomes and the best.