Imagine an unusually frosty New Year’s Day in the future and the power’s gone out. Seventeen people are due at 3 p.m., expecting salmon and football, and your oven and TV are just useless boxes. The local utility says there’s no downed trees causing an outage; instead, the power grid cannot keep up with the […]
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Sheri Call: Washington’s supply chain at risk with EV mandates
New zero-emission vehicle mandates on the trucking industry are creating serious challenges for trucking fleets, who face limited and costly options in order to operate legally in Washington state. That should concern all of us, since almost 90% of consumer goods arrive by truck. At issue is the state’s adoption of California’s Advanced Clean Trucks […]
Energy demand from data centers growing faster than West can supply, experts say
Data centers being rapidly built in the West are becoming an “emerging risk” to electrical grid reliability in the region, according to regional transmission experts. New data centers, which can be built in as little as 18 months, are far outpacing the growth in new electrical energy supply and transmission, according to members of the […]
Washington state ‘increasingly at risk’ for rolling blackouts
(The Center Square) – A proposed battery energy storage system near Goldendale under consideration by the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council would, if ultimately approved by Gov. Jay Inslee, be able to provide 200,000 homes with electricity for up to four hours. It’s a facility that Washington residents might need if the state is unable […]
PNW data center boom could imperil power supply within 5 years
PORTLAND — The Pacific Northwest’s power grid could be pushed beyond its limits in just five years by the staggering electricity demands of the booming data center industry, regional power planners recently reported. A forecast by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council highlights a looming conflict between an increasingly digital world and utilities’ capacity to […]
Keep lights on as Washington transitions to clean power
A January cold snap that strained the Pacific Northwest electricity grid also serves as a cautionary tale for its future. With temperatures in the teens, power utilities across Washington struggled to cover spiking demand to keep the lights on. Puget Sound Energy, the state’s largest utility, even asked its customers to turn down thermostats and […]
The costs of WA’s cap-and-trade law are just getting started
When the Legislature passed the Climate Commitment Act in 2021, the fiscal note for the law projected prices for carbon credits starting at $20 and increasing by a dollar or so a year. Instead, prices shot up in this year’s auctions, to more than three times that level. Washington’s carbon credits are selling for prices […]
Editorial: Who causes high fuel prices? Politicians need only look in mirror
A couple of months ago, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee famously said that oil companies alone are to blame for skyrocketing gasoline and diesel fuel prices in his state. “We want to give drivers relief. We want to go to the heart of this problem, which is the greed and avarice of oil companies, who are […]
WA’s carbon-pricing auctions collect nearly $1.5 billion as allowances reach record price
The price of Washington’s carbon emission allowances reached an all-time high in the state’s fourth auction last week, with revenue from the program nearing $1.5 billion in its first year. The revenue has far outpaced early estimates, and now a group that helped advocate for and pass the legislation that created the carbon-pricing market is […]
More pricey carbon allowances sell amid pain at the pump
A special pool of carbon allowances was auctioned by the Department of Ecology last week and the results figure to pour figurative gasoline on the debate over the cap-and-trade system’s impact on the price of actual gasoline. This latest auction stems from the state’s Climate Commitment Act which caps the total amount of CO2 that […]