||| FROM PROPUBLICA |||
On Feb. 17, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek released a video assuring Oregonians that Donald Trump would not derail the progressive state’s efforts to combat climate change.
As promised during his presidential campaign, Trump had issued executive orders during his first week in office aimed at halting new sources of wind power and freezing Biden-era funding for renewable energy.
Oregon, Kotek said, had been “leading the way for years on courageous state policies to fight climate change.” Along with neighboring Washington state, Oregon has set an ambitious mandate for electric utilities to be carbon neutral within the next two decades.
“It’s going to take all of us working together finding innovative solutions, no matter the obstacles, to confront the climate crisis,” the governor said, “and we are not turning back.”
But the reality is not nearly as inspiring as Kotek made it sound. For all their progressive claims, Oregon and Washington trail nearly all other states in adding new sources of renewable energy. Iowa, a Republican-led state with roughly the same population and usable volume of wind as Oregon, has built enough wind farms to generate three times as much wind power.
What’s held the Northwest back is a bottleneck Oregon and Washington leaders paid little attention to when they set out to go 100% green, an investigation by ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting found: The region lacks the wiring to deliver new sources of renewable energy to people’s homes, and little has been done to change that.
Northwest leaders left it to a federal agency known as the Bonneville Power Administration to arrange badly needed upgrades to an electrical grid that’s nearly a century old in places.
Bonneville, under a setup that is unique to the Northwest, owns most of the power lines needed to carry green power from the region’s sunny and windy high desert to its major population centers. Bonneville has no state or local representation within its federally appointed bureaucracy and, by statute, operates as a self-funded business.
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The concept of renewable, “green” energy used to be one favored by members of both political parties. For example, “red” Texas has the most wind power available, to date. This article’s implication that Washington and Oregon–with their “progressive claims” are underperforming shows that the author is unfamiliar with the complexities of who funds such projects, under what circumstances, and where they are located. And yes, the Bonneville part of Washington’s equation would require a bit of Federal assistance, as well. Meanwhile, data centers keep locating in Washington due to our low power costs, and have started driving up those costs for the rest of us due to supply and demand… though that’s another topic for consideration.