This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.
Electric companies in Oregon and Washington are hurtling toward deadlines to stop using power generated by coal, gas and other fuels that contribute to global warming. Yet the states are nowhere near achieving their goals, and the dramatic consequences are already being felt.
During a winter storm in January 2024, for example, the Northwest barely had enough power to meet demand as homeowners cranked up electric heaters and energy prices surged to more than $1,000 per megawatt-hour, or 18 times higher than the usual price. Power lines were so congested that owners of the transmission network made an extra $100 million selling access to the highest bidder.
Multiple utilities were operating in states of emergency during the storm, preparing for rotating power outages.
The storm “highlighted a tipping point and demonstrated how close the region is to a resource adequacy crisis,” the Western Power Pool, a regionwide organization of utilities, wrote in its assessment of the event.
Price spikes like this are one reason customers of major utilities in Oregon are paying 50% more on their power bills than they were in 2019. The number of utility customers disconnected last year for failure to pay soared to 70,000, the highest number on record.
Forecasters predict periods of extreme weather in the Northwest will only bring more trouble in the future: the threat of rolling blackouts within the decade if the region’s current energy trends continue.
Wind, solar and other renewables are the only forms of power that can be added to solve the problem, thanks to Oregon’s and Washington’s green energy mandates. Yet better transmission lines are needed to carry new energy sources in the windy and sunny eastern parts of the region to big cities west of the Cascade Mountain Range.
Experts say adding transmission lines in corridors that currently lack them would also enable utilities to keep power flowing when ice storms or wildfires threaten other parts of the grid.
The biggest owner of these transmission lines, the federal Bonneville Power Administration, has been slow to spend on upgrades — and slow to approve new green projects until upgrades are made.
Bonneville’s parent agency, the Energy Department, declined to make officials available for an interview, but Bonneville answered written questions.
“The potential for blackouts in the Pacific Northwest is incredibly low,” the agency said. “Grid planners and operators will continue to ensure reliability.”
Washington and Oregon lawmakers failed to address the Bonneville bottleneck when they approved clean energy mandates in 2019 and 2021, as ProPublica and OPB reported recently.
Oregon Rep. Ken Helm, a Portland-area Democrat who was a sponsor of the 2021 legislation, said the failure to prioritize transmission lines wasn’t the only flaw with the legislation. He said the bill failed to provide accountability, having no penalties for when a utility did not reach certain deadlines for acquiring either solar or wind energy. Helm said now, House Bill 2021 is “dead letter law.”
“Senators and representatives like me, we cannot continue to believe our own PR, that we have been successful in promoting a renewable electricity future,” said Helm, a member of the House Committee on Climate, Energy and Environment. “We are not heading in that direction, and we’re going to have to take action to change that or nothing will happen.”
Some lawmakers tried to play catch-up this year. Legislators in each state drew up plans for state transmission authorities that could finance improvements independent of utilities and Bonneville. Those efforts failed.
“Oregon desperately needs to take some leadership here,” said Nicole Hughes, executive director of the group Renewable Northwest, which advocates for weaning the region off of fossil fuels.
The Northwest’s situation is only expected to get worse. The region’s electrical demand is forecast to double over the next 20 years, in large part because data centers, rewarded with tax breaks in both Oregon and Washington, are driving an increase in power use the region hasn’t experienced since the early 1980s.
Abandoning Oregon’s and Washington’s renewable energy laws wouldn’t help, Oregon’s Citizens’ Utility Board says, because new fossil fuel power plants would cost ratepayers more than wind or solar. Those plants would still have to contend with transmission lines that have no room for their power.
The region’s utilities, meanwhile, say they’d like to add 29,000 megawatts of generating capacity over the next 10 years — an unprecedented addition that would be roughly equivalent to all the electricity that the Northwest currently consumes at any given time. The projects on their to-do list are powered entirely by renewable energy.
Yet the utilities added only a little over half the power to their systems that they planned for last year. In fact, of the 469 projects that applied to connect to Bonneville’s grid in the past decade, the only one to win the agency’s approval was in 2022. Growth in green energy in 2024 came from projects that began seeking a connection to Bonneville’s grid prior to 2015 or that connected to smaller transmission networks owned by private utilities.
If the utilities continue to fall as short of their goals as they did in 2024, then projections from the Western Electricity Coordinating Council suggest residents will spend the equivalent of nearly a month annually under the threat of brownouts — the inability to power all the circuits in a household — or blackouts.
“In the next few years, we may start having to make some tough choices about the availability of electricity,” Hughes said.
Hughes has spent 20 years in the renewables industry.
For now, she said, her family decided to buy a gas generator for times when their house loses power.