“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.” (The Seattle Times editorial board, 04.05.24)
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