This article was created for Propublica’s local reporting network in collaboration with Oregon’s public broadcasting. Sign up for Dispatch to get stories in your inbox every week.
Electric companies in Oregon and Washington are rushing towards deadlines to stop using electricity generated by coal, gas and other fuels that contribute to global warming. But the states are nowhere near enough to achieve their goals, and dramatic results are already felt.
For example, during the winter storm in January 2024, the northwest was not strong enough to meet demand as homeowners crank up electric heaters and energy prices surged more than $1,000 per megawatt hour, or more than 18 times the regular price. The power lines were so busy that the owners of the transmission network added $100 million in sales access to the highest bidder.
During the storm, several utilities were operating in an emergency situation, preparing for a power outage.
The storm “emphasized a turning point and demonstrated how close the region is to a crisis of resource validity,” wrote Western Power Pool, a utility organization across the region, in an evaluation of the event.
Such price spikes are one of the reasons Oregon’s major utility customers are paying 50% more on the electricity bill than in 2019. The number of utility customers who were disconnected last year after failing to make payments up to 70,000, the highest number on record.
Forecasters predict the period of extreme weather in the northwest. There will only be more trouble in the future. If the current energy trends in the region continue, it is a threat of power outages within 10 years.
Thanks to Oregon and Washington’s green energy obligations, wind, solar and other renewable energies are the only forms of electricity that can be added to solve the problem. However, better transmission lines are needed to transport new energy sources to the region’s windy, clear, eastern parts of the area to the west of the Cascade Mountains.
Experts say adding transmission lines to corridors where they are currently lacking can keep power flowing when ice storms and wildfires threaten other parts of the grid.
The Federal Bonneville Power Agency, the largest owner of these lines, spent slower on upgrades and slower approvals for new green projects until the upgrade was made.
The Energy Department, Bonneville’s parent agency, refused to make officials available for interviews, but Bonneville answered written questions.
“The chances of a blackout in the Pacific Northwest are very low,” the agency said. “The grid planners and operators will continue to ensure reliability.”
Lawmakers in Washington and Oregon failed to address the Bonneville Bottleneck when they approved clean energy powers of attorney in 2019 and 2021, as recently reported by ProPublica and OPB.
Oregon Rep. Ken Helm, a Portland area Democrat who sponsored the 2021 law, said the failure to prioritize transmission lines was not the only flaw in the law. He said there will be no penalties for the bill to fail to provide accountability and for utilities to fail to reach a specific deadline for obtaining solar or wind energy. Helm is now House Bill 2021, the “Dead Letters Act.”
“Senators and representatives like me can’t continue to believe in our own PR. We are successful in promoting the future of renewable electricity,” said Helm, a member of the House Committee on Climate, Energy and the Environment. “We’re not heading that way, we have to take action to change it, or nothing will happen.”
Some lawmakers have tried to catch up this year. Legislators in each state have planned a state transmission authority that could fund improvements independent of utility and Bonneville. Those efforts failed.
“Oregon needs to have some kind of leadership here,” said Nicole Hughes, executive director of the group Renabiliable Northwest, who advocates weaning fossil fuel regions.
The situation in the northwest is expected to only get worse. Electrical demand in the region is projected to double over the next 20 years as data centers that have been rewarded with tax cuts in both Oregon and Washington drive increased electricity usage that has not been experienced since the early 1980s.
Abandoning Oregon and Washington’s renewable energy laws would be useless, the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Commission said that new fossil fuel power plants will cost more wages than wind or solar. These plants still have to compete with transmission lines that do not have room for their power.
Meanwhile, the regional utility hopes to add 29,000 megawatts of generation capacity over the next decade. This is an unprecedented addition, roughly equivalent to all the electricity the Northwest is currently consuming. The to-do list project is fully equipped with renewable energy.
The Department of Energy has pledged a $32 million solar grant to the tribal nation. Access is almost impossible.
However, the utility added just half of the power to the system it planned last year. In fact, out of the 469 projects applied to connect to the Bonneville grid in the past decade, the only project to win agency approval was in 2022. The growth of green energy in 2024 came from projects that began seeking connections with Bonneville’s grid before 2015, or from projects that connected to small transmission networks owned by private utilities.
If utility continues to meet its targets as it did in 2024, forecasts from the Western Electricity Coordinating Council suggest that residents will be worth nearly a month each year under the threat of brownout.
“In the coming years, we may have to make tough choices regarding the availability of electricity,” Hughes said.
Hughes spent 20 years in the renewable energy industry.
For now, she said her family decided to buy a gas generator at a time when their home was losing its strength.
