The year-end emergency in Washington state was caused by record rainfall and widespread flooding. (President Donald Trump declared a federal emergency and authorized disaster assistance.) Thousands of people have been displaced, and it will take months to repair damage to major highways.
“It’s ironic, when we have a real emergency, that this time they chose to make up an energy emergency,” said KC Golden, a member of the Northwest Energy and Conservation Council, an interstate agency created by Congress to ensure energy reliability while protecting the environment.
Although there is no emergency electricity shortage in the Pacific Northwest, the region, like most of the United States, has a serious and worsening long-term electricity supply problem.
Washington and Oregon have about 100 data centers. Oregon is second only to Virginia in terms of data center capacity, and the centers consume 11 percent of Oregon’s energy supply, nearly three times the national average, according to the Siteline Institute, a research center in Seattle.
Energy use is rising along with the region’s booming high-tech economy, its huge appetite for electric vehicles (the Seattle Times reported that 26% of new cars registered in Washington in October were electric vehicles), and climate change-driven growth in home air conditioners. The Northwest could face a 9-gigawatt power shortfall by 2030, according to a recent utility-funded program. a report By E3 Energy Advisory Group. Nine gigawatts is roughly equivalent to Oregon’s electricity load.
“We have a real energy supply challenge, and we’ve been slow to address that challenge,” said Golden, who represents Washington state on the Northwest Energy Council.
The Pacific Northwest gets more of its energy from hydroelectric dams than any other part of the country (60% in Washington), and the region has long been blessed with cheap electricity prices. But drought and changing weather patterns (less snow and more rain) have hurt the reliability of the system, which draws most of its power from large federal dams on the Columbia River, North America’s largest hydroelectric resource.