‘Everything Will Be Fine’ Is Not a Grid Strategy

Here’s the unsettling part: both men were telling the truth. The warnings were real, and so was the surprise. Somewhere between the filings and the governor’s desk, alarm got translated into reassurance—background noise, until the lights went out.

The Pacific Northwest is now running the same experiment.

The warnings here are just as clear. Last October, North American Electric Reliability Corporation President Jim Robb told federal regulators that grid reliability is a “five-alarm fire.” The Western Electricity Coordinating Council’s 2025 resource-adequacy assessment found loss-of-load risk across the decade even if every planned resource gets built on schedule, with the Northwest among the West’s highest-risk areas. And history says only about two-thirds of planned resources arrive on time, so the realistic outlook is worse.

And the reassurance is just as loud. When my colleague Kelly Fukai, CEO of the Northwest Gas Association, and I wrote recently that winter, not data centers, is the gravest threat to the Northwest grid—and that policymakers need to pace electrification and decarbonization policies to meet reality—Renewable Northwest’s Mike Goetz dismissed the argument as one of a “handful of alarmist narratives.”

The NW Energy Coalition, meanwhile, has spent years assuring anyone who will listen that the four lower Snake River dams can be replaced for about a dollar a month per household—with grid reliability “equal to or better than the current system.” This was always a dubious argument that relied on increased use of natural gas generation through market purchases, but the argument became untenable after NWEC helped pass 100 percent clean energy mandates in Oregon and Washington (Clearing Up No. 1845).

Meanwhile, the studies that have examined replacing the dams without natural gas or future technological breakthroughs put replacement costs north of $10 billion.

In other words, the math has changed, but their message hasn’t: don’t be alarmed.

California’s leaders thought the same thing right up until the lights went out.

The Northwest got its own preview in January 2024, when an Arctic blast pushed the region into a reliability emergency. Wind and solar output sagged, the hydro system was pushed hard, and blackouts were narrowly avoided, while natural gas heating met most of the region’s total energy needs on the coldest day. The next step would have been shedding load: homes, schools and businesses, in the cold.

Then there’s Energy and Environmental Economics. Its two-phase study for the Public Generating Pool and 14 utility and power-sector sponsors projects a shortfall of dependable electricity of roughly 9 GW by 2030 under a low-hydro, cold-snap scenario. That deficit is more than Oregon’s entire average demand, widening to 14 to 18 GW by 2035.

And E3 expects the need to keep climbing after that, driven primarily by building electrification—the wholesale shift from end-use natural gas to electric heat pumps. Heating looms so large that E3 found a policy shift to hybrid heat pumps (heat pumps with natural gas backup) could shave up to 7 GW off the region’s 2045 resource need.

E3 concludes a 100-percent-clean grid is infeasible without at least one breakthrough technology that can provide clean, firm, dispatchable generation at commercial scale, something that can run for many hours through a cold snap. Only one such resource exists at scale in the region today. It’s hydropower. And a federal court just ordered the region to use less of it.

To comply with that ruling in the salmon litigation, federal agencies this spring began spilling more water over the Columbia and Snake dams instead of running it through turbines, cutting hydropower output by 1,000 MW in August and 500 MW in September at a cost to Bonneville Power Administration customers of more than $100 million a year.

Yet the reassurance from NWEC was immediate: the system can absorb it.

The same goes for the promise that flexible demand will carry us through. Renewable Northwest’s answer to rising load is to have large new users like data centers ramp down during peak events, and Goetz cites an analysis by Sylvan Energy Analytics faulting the study we relied on for leaving that flexibility out.

What he doesn’t mention is what Sylvan’s own modeling shows: the shortfall doesn’t disappear when you put flexibility in. Presenting to Oregon’s Data Center Advisory Committee in May, Sylvan found the region still comes up as much as 3 GW short under January 2024 conditions, even with aggressive assumptions about emergency data center curtailment, and baseline scenarios would require seven to nine days of sustained large-load curtailments. Sylvan’s own conclusion: multiday shortages are “very hard to solve with existing clean technologies.”

The problem is that data center flexibility doesn’t address the bigger threat: heating homes when it’s 15 degrees Fahrenheit outside, which peaks exactly when the region’s wind and solar output is near zero and four-hour batteries have run down.

None of this is an argument against clean energy or demand response, and I want to see a less polluting grid. But math still matters, and that’s exactly why the reassurance is dangerous, not just wrong.

When the organizations that policymakers trust most tell them not to worry, the tough decisions don’t get made. Firm resources take years to permit and construct. Transmission can take decades. The region can’t afford to discover what it’s missing in the middle of an Arctic blast, when it’s too late to build anything.

The cost of getting this wrong won’t fall on the advocates. E3 projects retail rates rising 36- to 47-percent above inflation by 2045—and that’s without achieving a fully carbon-free grid. Getting all the way to a carbon-free grid without commercially mature technologies like small modular reactors, hydrogen or carbon capture would nearly triple today’s retail rate.

The Seattle Times editorial board, citing the same study, recently wrote that it “should alarm every Washingtonian.” The low-income households already stretched by their bills will feel it first.

To be fair, there are signs of more candor. Renewable Northwest’s own executive director, Nicole Hughes, has acknowledged that natural gas still has a role, and the organization now describes its posture as “all of the above.”

That’s the instinct we need more of. Downplaying the problem and dismissing repeated warnings from NERC and WECC is a step in the wrong direction.

The real disagreement here isn’t about whether we want a cleaner grid. It’s about candor. Policymakers need to make these decisions now, not when blackouts are happening. They deserve the picture the reliability experts are drawing, not the version that’s easiest to hear. And unlike California’s governor in 2020, no one here will be able to say they weren’t warned.

We can debate the tradeoffs honestly, or we can keep telling each other everything will be fine until the week it isn’t. The studies are done. The warnings are on the record.

When the smoke alarm goes off, the answer isn’t to call it alarmist. The answer is to put out the fire.

Kurt Miller is CEO and executive director of the Northwest Public Power Association, which represents more than 150 consumer-owned electric utilities across the Western United States and British Columbia. He lives in Vancouver, Washington.