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.

The Western Electricity Coordinating Council’s sobering report starkly notes that even if all planned solar, wind and other renewable power projects are completed in the Northwest region over the next decade, new demands for electricity — including booming data center construction — will outpace that new generation.

At best, the result is increasing utility bills and, at worst, rolling power outages. That would be a startling result for a region so-long buttressed by abundant hydropower.

The Council estimates that if only 55% of the planned new clean sources of poweris built in the next 10 years, the number of “at-risk hours” — when blackouts could occur as demand exceeds supply — will grow from eight in 2025 to 787 in 2034.

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.

Leaders at several utilities, including Seattle City Light, sounded the alarm to lawmakers at a Dec. 13 hearing of the Senate’s environment, energy and technology committee. They noted that Washington’s grid came dangerously close to blackouts this past January, when a polar vortex plummeted temperatures and stalled wind and solar power generation.

Under state Commerce Department projections, Washington could actually become a net importer of power, given how cheaply and efficiently solar and wind power can be generated elsewhere. But the wires transporting high voltage power can take decades to build. Seattle City Light CEO Dawn Lindell testified that planning for one high-voltage transmission line through Oregon and Idaho started in 2007 and construction only just began this fall.

“So I hope that scares you, because it really scares me,” Lindell said.

Lawmakers appeared incredulous over northwest utilities’ plans to complete a whopping 7,000 megawatts of new clean energy by 2026.

“That can’t be right. 2026? Really?” quipped State Sen. Joe Nguyen, D-White Center, the committee’s chair and recently tapped Commerce Department director.

“There may be some challenges meeting that,” responded Austin Scharff, the agency’s senior energy policy specialist.

Scharff’s response drew laughs from lawmakers. (Check it out here: st.news/energy)

What wasn’t funny: Steve Andersen, Clark Public Utilities’ energy resources director, estimated that, had it not been for storm-caused power failures reducing the region’s high electric load during the polar vortex, his Vancouver-based utility might have faced rolling blackouts.  

Andersen testified that the state’s clean energy requirements may exacerbate the risks of those blackouts when the grid is strained during heat waves or cold snaps.

Clark Public Utilities operates River Road, a natural gas-fueled plant that can feed the grid more than 200 average megawatts of electricity at the flip of a switch. But under the state’s Clean Energy Transformation Act, or CETA, the utility must reduce the its greenhouse gas-emitting sources of power to 20% or less of all its portfolio by 2030.

So Clark Utilities will roughly halve the production at River Road and increase its reliance on the Bonneville Power Administration, whose hydropower generation is expected to decline due to drought, including shrinking mountain snowpack, over the next decade.

Andersen said that new, on-demand supplies of clean power for the utility are a decade away. Deployment of those — whether small modular nuclear reactors, geothermal power plants or long duration battery storage — will not likely occur until the mid-2030s.

“And until they get here, we know we’re left with wind and solar and we can’t count on them during these peak winter events and these peak summer events,” he said.

Andersen told lawmakers he’s growing concerned about picking between following CETA and ensuring ratepayers have electricity — all while River Road must operate below capacity. The gas plant could provide a backstop in emergent situations.

California provides an example — and a potential solution. The state is awash in its nation-leading supply of solar power during the day. But during stifling heat waves in 2021, the state’s grid operator couldn’t handle the load once the sun went down, resulting in rolling blackouts. Gov. Gavin Newsom declared an emergency that allows deployment of up to 120 average megawatts of gas-generated power to stave off blackouts.

Gov.-elect Bob Ferguson and state legislators should consider a similar exemption for Washington to safeguard the state’s electricity supply.    

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.