The coal industry in the Pacific Northwest received a heavy blow yesterday with the release of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council’s (NWPCC’s) Sixth Power Plan, describing how the region encompassing Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana can cost-effectively shut down at least half its coal plants (including coal plants outside the region that supply these states with electricity) by the year 2020. The NWPCC failed to include this move to phase out coal in its official recommendation, for such is the power of the coal lobby. Yet the fact that the Council did include the analysis in its Sixth Plan is a testament to the hard work of climate activists in the lead-up to the Plan’s release.
During the fall of 2009, the NWPCC held hearings on its Sixth Plan throughout the Northwest. Back then, it was unclear whether the final plan would analyze how our region could begin moving away from coal at all. Yet by the end of the year, the Sierra Club and allied organizations had turned out hundreds of people to hearings in Oregon, Washington, and Montana, to urge the Council to use its own studies to show that a coal-free Northwest is possible. I myself attended hearings in the Oregon cities of Portland and Eugene, where I heard NWPCC members remark repeatedly on how impressed they were with public involvement in this process, and with the turnout of young people to both hearings.
Thanks in large part to grassroots activism, the final Sixth Power Plan shows how the Northwest can phase out at least half of its coal plants, meet the great majority of its new energy needs through increased efficiency, and feasibly reduce greenhouse emissions with a carbon price of $47 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted. The Plan clearly shows that there is absolutely no need to build a new coal plant anywhere in the four-state region of the Northwest.
Is the Sixth Power Plan the final word in the struggle to end the Northwest’s reliance on dirty coal? Of course not. For one thing, phasing out half of our region’s coal plants only gets us halfway to where we need to be. For another, utilities are not bound to act on the fact that the road toward a lower-carbon future is now illuminated. Ultimately, the people who must be persuaded that public opinion will not tolerate a prolonged dependence on coal are the decision-makers in major utilities, and the government agencies with direct authority to regulate pollution. It’s time to build on the groundswell of activism that scored this victory in the Sixth Power Plan, and use it to keep up the pressure to eliminate coal use in the Northwest altogether.
We must begin by closing Oregon’s Boardman Coal Plan well before the 2020 shutdown date proposed by Portland General Electric. We must close TransAlta’s coal plant in Centralia, Washington, Montana’s massive Colstrip Plant, and many others. The Northwest needs to invest heavily in renewable energy and efficiency projects to replace the electricity now derived from coal, while at the same time providing thousands of green-collar jobs. The road ahead will be marked by some setbacks, but many victories as well.
The release of the Sixth Power Plan is one of these victories. It’s a victory because a third-party government body has now clearly shown that a transition away from coal is possible. It’s a victory because it has shown climate activists in the Northwest the power we can have when we get organized. Now let’s take this victory and run with it.
What’s even more impressive is that the NWPCC has representation from Montana and Idaho, which are much more coal dependent and not know for their environmental progress. Great job and keep it moving!
Yes,progress urge us to more
An article in the Energy Daily said that the portion of remaining demand after efficiency and wind would be natural gas. Any thoughts whether this would encourage the LNG proposals?
Robert (Rmarg), you’re right that natural gas plays a prominent role in the Northwest’s path to a coal-free electricity system. Already, we’ve seen Oregon and Washington utilities turn away from plans for numerous new coal plants to focus on efficiency, renewables and natural gas to meet demand.
Unfortunately for the Northwest’s efforts to kick fossil fuels entirely, energy demand in the region is still growing (all those darned hipsters relocating to my beloved Portland perhaps! Or the server farms cropping up in the Columbia Gorge…). That means that while the Northwest states are leaders in tapping the region’s abundant renewable energy potential, the current trajectory means that efficiency and renewables will essentially meet all growth in energy demand. That still leaves the 40% or so of the region’s energy supply today that comes from coal to deal with, and that’s where natural gas comes into the region’s energy plans. There’s probably more that can be done to speed the rate of renewable energy deployment, but it’s already moving pretty fast. It’ll be hard to cut out coal without natural gas, at least that’s the conclusion of every regional utility resource plan as well as the Northwest Power and Conservation Council.
I guess it is still an open question as to whether or not LNG will crop up to meet that demand for natural gas-fired plants. There’s an increasingly abundant supply of North American gas these days, including in Montana. An alternative to LNG would be a new pipeline bringing gas in from the intermountain region across the Rockies. Neither scenario is likely to please regional climate and clean energy advocates, and it’ll be a continued fight to get the Northwest off of fossil fuels entirely (especially if the region avoids nuclear power as well). The scales are hard to wrestle with…
There’s three really important things about LNG that need to be kept in mind here, as we talk about how to replace the Northwest’s reliance on coal:
First, the western US has access to huge reserves of North American gas, and under even the most extreme scenarios it’s very unlikely we would run out of North American gas and need imported LNG. Proposed LNG projects are clearly not primarily designed to feed the Northwest market; rather, they’re intended to use Oregon as a cunduit to pipe gas down to the mammoth market in California. The proposed pipelines would hold more gas than Washington and Oregon combined could possibly use, so there’s no way to make the argument that this gas is destined primarily for the Northwest market. Further, Northwest electricity providers aren’t even particularly interested in LNG. Portland General Electric, the owner of Oregon’s only coal plant, has specifically said it has no plans to use LNG as a replacement for coal, even if the Boardman coal plant is shut down sooner than planned.
Second, LNG has a much higher carbon footprint than North American gas, because of the energy required to liquefy gas, ship it across the ocean, and then re-gasify it. According to the Oregon Department of Energy, LNG shipped from a long ways away has a carbon footprint similar to that of coal. So if we close down our coal plants only to replace them with LNG, we haven’t accomplished anything. Indeed, if that happens we’ll simply have locked ourselves into decades more of dependence on high-carbon fossil fuels.
Third, LNG will destroy Oregon jobs. Renewable energy projects have the potential to create new jobs in parts of the state that are struggling economically. LNG, on the other hand, will create a relatively small number of largely temporary jobs. At the same time, LNG infrastructure projects would eliminate farming, fishing, and timber-growing jobs as the terminals destroyed fish habitat on the coast and the Columbia River, and as the pipelines cut through prime farm and forestland. These jobs that stand to be eliminated are largely long-term jobs that contribute much more to Oregon’s economy than would most of the jobs created by building LNG pipelines. LNG is a bad deal for Oregon’s economy, as well as the environment.
Replacing the Northwest’s coal plants is an unparalleled opportunity to re-charge our economy with renewable energy industries, and make the Northwest a center of the clean tech resolution. If instead of doing this we use LNG to replace coal, we’ll be blowing it big time.
Even for pipeline gas, I recall how in the 90s NOTHING was happening in the energy field as cheap natural gas was considered the answer for everything. I would bet the shale gas will not last as long as claimed with big increases in demand if it is the majority substitute for coal. Hopefully, we will not repeat that history.