Higher prices, rolling blackouts: The Northwest is bracing for effects of lagging green energy push

During a winter storm in January 2024, for example, the northwest had a sufficient energy to meet the demand, as homeowners rose electric heaters and energy prices rose to more than $ 1,000 per megawatt hour, or 18 times higher than the usual price. Energy lines have been crowded to the extent that the owners of the transmission network were able to sell an additional $ 100 million for sale to the highest bid.

Multiple facilities were working in emergency situations during the storm, as they were preparing for the power outages.

The Western Power Pool, a facility organization throughout the region, wrote in its evaluation of the event “The Storm highlighted” highlighting the turning point and showed how close the region is from the resource adequacy crisis.

The high prices like this is one of the reasons why customers are the main facilities in Oregon paying 50 % on their energy bills more than they were in 2019.

Father expects that the harsh weather periods in the northwest will only bring more troubles in the future: the threat of power outages during the contract if the current energy trends in the region continue.

Winds, solar energy and other renewable energy sources are the only forms of energy that can be added to solve the problem, thanks to green energy delegations in Oregon and Washington. However, better transport lines are needed to carry new energy sources in the eastern parts of the wind and sunny from the region to large cities west of the CASCADE mountain range.

Experts say that adding transport lines in the corridors currently lacks that will also allow facilities to maintain energy flow when ice storms or forest fires threaten other parts of the network.

The largest owner of these transportation lines, Federal Energy Management Bonville, was slow to spend on promotions – and Surprisingly in approval of new green projects Until promotions are made.

Mother Agency Bonville, the Ministry of Energy, refused to provide officials to conduct an interview, but Bonville answered the written questions.

The agency said: “The possibility of power outages in the northwest of the Pacific Ocean is incredibly low,” the agency said. “Network planners and operators will continue to ensure reliability.”

Washington and Oregon lawmakers failed to treat the Bonfille bottleneck when they agreed to clean energy delegations in 2019 and 2021, according to Propublica and OPB recently.

Oregon Ken Hilm, a democratic in the Portland region, was a sponsor of legislation for the year 2021, that the failure to determine the priorities of the transport lines was not the only defect in legislation. He said that the draft law failed to provide accountability, and the absence of penalties when no benefit amounts to certain final dates to acquire solar energy or wind energy. Helm now said, “The Parliament’s Law 2021 is” ​​the Law of Dead Messages. “

“Members of the Senate and representatives of the gay, we cannot continue to believe our public relations, that we have succeeded in enhancing the future of renewable electricity,” said Helm, a member of the Climate, Energy and Environment Committee. “We are not going in this direction, and we will have to take measures to change this or nothing will happen.”

Some legislators have tried to play catching this year. Labor in each state has made plans for state transfer authorities, which could fund improvements independently of facilities and Bonfille. These efforts failed.

“Oregon is strongly needed to take some leadership here,” said Nicole Hughes, CEO of the renewed group in the northwest, who calls for weaning the region off the fossil fuel.

The northwest position is expected to increase only. It is expected that the electrical demand in the region will double over the next twenty years, and this is greatly attributed to databases, It is rewarded with tax exemptions In both Oregon and Washington, they lead Increase in energy use The region has not been tested since the early eighties.

Abandoning renewable energy laws in Oregon and Washington The Citizen Elective Council in Oregon says.Because the new fossil power plants will cost the price perpetrators more than the wind or solar energy. These plants still have to face transportation lines that have no room for their strength.

Meanwhile, facilities in the region say it wants to add 29,000 megawatts of generation capacity over the next ten years – an unprecedented addition that may be almost equivalent to all the electricity that the northwest is currently consumed at any time. Projects are operated in their entire tasks list by renewable energy.

However, the facilities added slightly more than half of the force to its systems that planned for the past year. In fact, among the 469 projects submitted to Bonfille in the past decade, it was the only project that won the Agency’s approval in 2022. Growth in Green Energy came in 2024 of the projects that started searching for a Bonville network before 2015 or linked to the smaller transmission networks owned by special tools.

If the facilities continue to decline in less than their goals as they did in 2024, the expectations from the Western Electricity Coordination Council indicate that the population will spend the equivalent of nearly a year of annual month at Braonot’s threat – the inability to operate all circuits in the family – or power outages.

“In the next few years, we may start making some difficult options about the availability of electricity,” Hughes said.

Hughes spent 20 years in the renewable energy sources.

At the present time, she said, her family decided to buy a gas generator for times in which their house loses power.