The year-end emergency that does exist in Washington state has been caused by record-setting rainfall and widespread flooding. (President Donald Trump has declared a federal emergency and authorized disaster assistance.) Thousands of people have been displaced and damage to major highways will take months to repair.
“It is so ironic, when we have a real emergency, that they picked this time to fabricate an energy emergency,” said KC Golden, a member of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, an interstate agency created by Congress to ensure reliable power while protecting the environment.
While there is no emergency electricity shortfall in the Pacific Northwest, the region, like much of the United States, does have a serious and worsening long-term electricity supply problem.
Washington and Oregon are home to about 100 data centers. Oregon is second only to Virginia in data center capacity, and the centers consume 11 percent of Oregon’s power supply, nearly three times the national average, according to the Sightline Institute, a Seattle think tank.
Energy use is rising along with the region’s booming high-tech economy, its outsized 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-driven growth of home air-conditioning. The Northwest could face a 9-gigawatt shortfall of power by 2030, according to a recent utility-funded report by the energy consulting group E3. Nine gigawatts is roughly the electricity load of Oregon.
“We are facing a real energy supply challenge and we have been slow to take up that challenge,” said Golden, who represents Washington state on the Northwest power council.
The Pacific Northwest gets more of its power 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 hammered the reliability of the system, which draws most of its power from big federal dams on the Columbia River, North America’s largest hydroelectric resource.
