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 demand under the freezing conditions, triggering rolling blackouts.
This is no far-fetched holiday disaster. A regional power planning agency’s fall report raised the increasing prospect of such blackouts in the Pacific Northwest over the next decade. A cold snap this past January also pushed the grid to the brink, with utilities including Puget Sound Energy asking customers to cut back power use. And at a hearing last month, several utility district leaders warned state lawmakers that, unless new sources of electricity and transmission can be built quickly, those blackouts will become more likely.
Incoming Gov. Bob Ferguson and state lawmakers must find ways to accelerate new generation and transmission for the grid. But they must also consider emergency exemptions to the state’s clean energy strategy during dire grid-critical situations, as California has done. Above all, state leaders must commit to the notion that blackouts are a completely unacceptable result of state policy. …
Losing electricity doesn’t just throw your holiday salmon into jeopardy. It can be a life-threatening, grid-damaging event. The February 2021 winter storm in Texas provides an extreme example. Surging demand for power as temperatures plunged overwhelmed the Texas grid. The resulting blackouts killed hundreds of people, with hypothermia being the most common cause of death, as residents could not heat their homes. Many residents died from hypothermia as they could not heat their homes. …
The transition away from greenhouse-gas emitting sources of electricity is necessary and urgent — but it cannot come at the expense of grid reliability. Rolling blackouts and outages are an unacceptable outcome that must be avoided at all costs.
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