The year-end state of emergency that exists in Washington state has been caused by record-setting rainfall and widespread flooding. (President Donald Trump has declared a federal emergency and authorized disaster aid.) Thousands of people have been displaced and damage to major highways will take months to repair.
“It’s very ironic that, when we have a real emergency, they chose this time to create an energy emergency,” said Casey Golden, a member of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, an interstate agency created by Congress to ensure reliable electricity while protecting the environment.
Although there are no emergency power shortages in the Pacific Northwest, the region, like much of the United States, has serious and worsening long-term power supply problems.
Washington and Oregon are home to approximately 100 data centers. According to the Sightline Institute, a Seattle think tank, Oregon is second only to Virginia in data center capacity, and the centers consume 11 percent of Oregon’s electricity supply, nearly three times the national average.
Energy use is rising along with the region’s growing high-tech economy, its voracious appetite for electric cars (The Seattle Times reported that 26 percent of new cars registered in Washington in October were EVs) and the climate-change-induced increase of home air conditioning. The Northwest could face a 9-gigawatt electricity shortfall by 2030, according to a recent utility-funded report from energy consulting group E3. Nine gigawatts is roughly Oregon’s electricity load.
“We’re facing a real energy supply challenge and we’ve been slow to take up that challenge,” said Golden, who represents Washington state on the Northwest Power Council.
The Pacific Northwest gets more electricity from hydroelectric dams than any other part of the country (60 percent in Washington), and the region has long been blessed with cheap electricity rates. But drought and changing weather patterns (less snow, more rain) have hurt the reliability of the system, which gets most of its power from large federal dams on the Columbia River, North America’s largest hydroelectric resource.
<a href