Envision a clean energy future. Perhaps you see rolling hills lined with wind turbines and rooftops and buildings neatly lined with solar panels.
The push for clean, renewable energy and the electrification of nearly every aspect of our lives is happening in tandem, and that vision could become reality.
Electric vehicles are gaining in popularity. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has proposed retrofitting existing buildings to rid them of natural gas, and Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan is seeking to ban natural gas within the city. Throughout the Northwest, public transportation is being electrified. Many buses have shifted to battery power, and Washington ferries will be retrofitted with batteries.
Even private companies are going electric. Amazon’s delivery fleet is set to expand to 10,000 EVs by 2022 and 100,000 by 2030.
Inevitably, then, we will look to our electric grid to power many more of our daily needs.
This major shift to electrification could potentially double the Northwest’s electricity demand. To fulfill our carbon reduction goals, however, that new demand must be served with non-emitting forms of generation.
Fortunately, the Northwest already has a significant part of the solution — hydroelectricity.
The region receives roughly half of its electricity from hydropower, and dams lead the way producing 90% of our renewable energy.
However, hydropower won’t be able to tackle the increase in demand alone, so we expect many new wind and solar plants to populate our region.
Wind and solar power have shown their impressive capabilities, and they are improving and getting cheaper. But they depend on the presence of wind or sunshine and can fluctuate between over and underproducing power. This issue is known as intermittency.
These spikes and dips in a generation, if left unchecked, would damage the grid and lead to blackouts. That’s why they require backup. Batteries are often pointed to as the answer, but large-scale battery technology is still evolving, and their environmental impacts have raised eyebrows.
Again, hydropower provides a key solution. Hydroelectric dams can act like giant, clean batteries through the storage and release of water. When other renewables are producing surplus energy, water can be held back behind a dam and stored for later use. If those same renewables aren’t producing enough power, water can be released past hydroelectric turbines to generate power and meet demand.
In 2020, the Union of Concerned Scientists and other environmentally-minded organizations highlighted the importance of hydropower in adding other renewables to the grid.
It was an important reminder our region desperately needs. In the last two years, calls to remove highly productive dams in order to return rivers to a natural state have sharply grown. Currently, a process involving the governors of Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington is set to examine solutions for salmon recovery, including breaching dams that are vital to our region.
That is a bad sign because new estimates predict our region’s peak energy needs may exceed supply in the next few years. The last time we saw similar forecasts was just ahead of the 2000-2001 Western Energy Crisis, which had disastrous socioeconomic consequences for many Pacific Northwest communities.
We are still in the process of removing coal plants from the energy portfolio — a gap yet to be adequately filled with renewable resources. Should our elected officials push for dam removal, we risk losing thousands of megawatts of clean energy and hindering our ability to add much-needed wind and solar resources.
To put it simply, we must include hydroelectricity in our
clean energy vision. Otherwise, we risk that vision becoming a mere figment of
our imagination.
