OREGON, USA — Though the Northwest has long been able to count on a stable electricity supply, an industry consultant with 30 years' experience recently told planners in the area that there is trouble on the horizon.
The name of the game is balancing supply and demand, with the people running our power systems having to exactly balance it out. As we shut down coal plants to get more clean energy while at the same time adding data centers, which consume massive amounts of electricity, things are getting dicey.
During last January's snow and ice storm, more than 100,000 people lost power. But it's not because there was a shortage of electricity — this time, it was because trees tore down wires and smashed transformers.
But this week, the Northwest Power Planning Council, which studies our electric grid and supply, heard from an industry insider, who said that storm pushed the region closer to rolling blackouts than it's been in a long time.
"The personal opinion on that, for me, is it's almost a miracle that we didn't have rotating load shedding around the region," Robert Cromwell said. "We came that close in terms of 5 gigawatts from the Southwest and the desert Southwest to keep the lights on that week. And yes, most of that energy coming up was thermally generated."
In other words, the electricity that raced into our system back then was made by burning coal and natural gas.
Cromwell told the Northwest Power Council that the entire industry needs to gear up to build more electric transmission lines all over the Northwest.
"At the end of the day, we're going to need to get large loads resources to large loads reliably. And we're going to need to build more transmission faster than any time we have in the last 70 years as a region," he said. "We just simply don't have the institutional muscle memory in the utility organizations to do that."
Cromwell then pointed to a graphic put out by the council last August, which is a summary of studies on what could happen over the next five years.
The red box that says reference shows that if things happen as planners expect, the region should have enough electricity to get by.
But the next box down warns that if the region only gets low-end results on energy efficiency strategies, we risk rolling blackouts in the winter.
The last box shows that if there are higher data center loads — in other words, more data centers and more need for electricity than expected — then, the region is in big trouble, with the risk of blackouts in both winter and summer.
Cromwell warned the power planners to be extremely careful.
"I believe the council's priority should be on reliability. And I say that because I feel very strongly that if you want bad public policy to occur, start having elected officials attend funerals because we let the lights go out. Nothing will change policy faster than elected officials going to constituent funerals," he said.