Washington state’s approaching energy crisis. Good intentions going wrong | Guest Opinion

Washington state has trouble on the horizon — trouble with its electrical grid.

The trouble stems from attempts to decarbonize our society. Getting rid of coal, oil and gas in generating power is the low-hanging fruit, but just getting rid of them without a realistic plan to replace them will do more harm than good.

Seeing this trouble in Washington state, however, is scary. Washington is one of the most decarbonized states in the union with utilities getting more than 70% of their electricity from hydro and nuclear.

The state legislature passed the Clean Energy Transformation Act (CETA) in 2019 which requires all utilities eliminate coal by 2025 and be carbon neutral by 2030. Many experts warned that losing baseload sources like coal, or even hydro, and replacing them with wind, would increase the probability of brownouts and blackouts in the next ten years, like we’re seeing play out in California and Texas.

“In our kind of zeal to remove CO2 emissions and aim for this 100% clean energy, we’re creating a reliability crisis,” says Benton County PUD General Manager Rick Dunn.

Dunn warns that Washington faces a large gap between grid demand on the coldest and hottest days and the availability of dependable electrical generation over the next decade.

A similar warning came from the Northwest Power Pool. They consider an outage risk of <5% to be safe, but warn that the state faces a 26% probability of an outage in the next several years when the remaining coal plants retire, electric vehicle use increases, the continued drought reduces hydro output, and the population keeps growing.

CETA requires utilities to gradually shift toward clean energy sources such as wind that lack both the reliability and predictability of fossil-fuel resources and require back-up sources for when they fail to generate. Gas and hydro presently provide that backup in the Pacific Northwest, while gas provides it almost everywhere else in America.

Unfortunately, in Washington State, wind farms only generate 25% to 30% of their maximum capacity. By comparison, our nuclear plant generates over 90% of its maximum capacity.

But it’s even worse. According to the most recent E3 Northwest Resource Adequacy study, that number drops to only 7% on the coldest or hottest days — that is, only 500 MW of wind power, out of Washington’s 7,100 MW of wind power capacity can be expected to show up when it’s needed most. Compare this to the 100% for nuclear, gas and coal for the same periods.

As Dunn quips, praying for mild weather isn’t a plan.

We use to plan pretty well in the past for future energy crises when all we had to do was be sure we had enough energy at a reasonable price. We weren’t hamstrung by the push to decarbonize. It is not enough to just put up wind and solar without planning for the infrastructure needed to efficiently employ them, or without the hydro and small modular nuclear plants that should be backing them up instead of gas or the dream of sufficient batteries that is decades away.

These issues are front and center in Benton County where a proposed wind farm project of 244 super-large wind turbines on the ridgeline of Horse Heaven Hills would do little to help the state keep the grid reliable. But it has drawn protests from the local community.

At the same time, new wind plants require new high voltage transmission lines built across Washington and through mountainous terrain and vast natural landscapes, something that continues to be shot down by the public every time it’s proposed.

The other issue is that clean energy debates are so politicized. “When we bring up the issue of reliability…sometimes people interpret that as we’re against environmental issues,” said Dunn. “That is just so not the case. What we try to do is connect the dots between decarbonization, environmental compliance, renewable energy, and grid reliability so we can have affordable, reliable, and environmentally sustainable generation. Sometimes that gets lost in the message.”

We need a real plan for a low-carbon future. Wind cannot be relied upon in the cold of winter or the heat of summer, exactly when it’s most needed. To ignore this is to invite trouble. Big trouble.