Badger Club forum to discuss how Tri-Cities can meet future energy demands
More than forty years ago, fears of a looming power shortage pushed the Washington Public Power Supply System to embark on an ambitious plan to build five nuclear power plants—an effort that ultimately collapsed into the largest municipal bond default in American history.
Only one of those reactors was completed, and it continues to provide power today. In the decades since, the Northwest has met increasing demand with a mix of hydropower, wind, solar, conservation, and fossil fuels—largely by coasting on infrastructure built for a very different era.
That history matters now. The region is once again facing energy questions that can’t be answered with slogans or wishful thinking. The Columbia Basin Badger Club is devoting its March 26 forum to a hard look at where our power will come from—and whether the grid we inherited is up to the demands we’re placing on it. This isn’t a ribbon-cutting or a feel-good panel. It’s a reality check.
Our region is growing faster than the infrastructure built to serve it. Franklin County is one of the fastest-growing counties in the state. New homes bring EV chargers and year-round heating and cooling. Growth in food processing demands more electricity for refrigeration and more heat for processing—loads once supplied by natural gas.
Advanced manufacturing requires higher volumes of electricity—robotics and AI driven automation on the manufacturing floor help drive the demand. And then there are the mega-loads: data centers, heavy manufacturing, and hydrogen projects measured not in megawatts but in hundreds of megawatts—the equivalent of adding a small city almost overnight. A single hyperscale data center can match the electricity demand of all the homes in Kennewick combined.
None of this is theoretical. Local utilities are already fielding requests for loads so large they would require new substations, new transmission lines, and multi-year upgrades.
Benton PUD has said publicly that some proposals simply can’t be served with the grid we have. That’s not a warning—it’s a fact.
The president recently suggested that artificial-intelligence data-center developers should plan to provide their own power. That’s a nice sound bite, but even “modular” nuclear or renewable projects take years to permit and build—before we even get to gas turbines or other backup generation. And all of this under the umbrella of Washington’s Clean Energy Initiative, which requires utilities to plan for 100 percent carbon-free power by 2045. Anyone who thinks these facilities can just show up with a generator in the back of a pickup is kidding themselves.
Increasing hydro is, at best, unlikely, given the realities of our water resources and river management. That question is the topic of the Badger Club’s April 16 Forum.
And even if we solved generation tomorrow, we’d still face the harder problem: delivery.
The Bonneville Power Administration’s transmission system was built for a different era, when aluminum smelters were the big loads and cloud computing didn’t exist. We’ve been coasting on the investments of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s—and that bill is coming due. A new study for the Western Power Pool says that the region will need more than 12,600 miles of new or upgraded transmission lines in the next decade. Pretending otherwise won’t keep the lights on.
No matter the source, new generation doesn’t help if we can’t move power to where it’s needed. “Just say no to growth” won’t stop companies from trying to locate here; it only pushes them to take their jobs and payrolls elsewhere. And “just conserve more” is good policy, but conservation alone won’t cover a 300-megawatt data center. We are well past the point where small fixes will do.
This region has never been afraid of big projects. We built reactors, dams, and a world-class research laboratory. We know how to plan for the long term. What we can’t afford now is the illusion that growth will stop—or that the grid will somehow stretch to meet demand without serious investment. Hope is not a strategy, and nostalgia is not a plan.
We’ve asked three experts—each with a different vantage point on transmission, utility planning, and industrial demand—to help us understand what’s coming and what choices we actually have. Our energy future is ours to shape. The question is whether we’ll face it squarely—or wait until the lights flicker to admit we should have acted sooner.
That’s why the Columbia Basin Badger Club is putting this issue front and center on March 26. The forum will be presented in hybrid form, in person and online, and registration is free at columbiabasinbadgers.com. If we want the Tri-Cities to keep growing, we need an honest conversation about what it will take to build (and pay for) the power system that growth requires.
Kirk Williamson was an award-winning radio news director in the 1970s and 80s. He is a founding member of the Badger Club and has served as program chair and president.