Politics Impedes Green Goals

Location: New York
Author: Carl Dombek
Date: Tuesday, November 15, 2011

A lack of transmission is not the largest impediment to short- and intermediate-term development of more renewable energy in the Pacific Northwest, former BPA Administrator Randy Hardy said Nov. 9 at the 3rd Annual conference Developing Wind Power in the Northwest in Seattle, Wash.

The Pacific Northwest has an abundance of renewable generation, Hardy said. “With the possible exception of ERCOT in Texas, [there is no] other region in the country that has nearly this amount of saturation of wind relative to the amount of [native] load that it has.”

While much of that wind energy was developed for export to California, the largest customer for the area’s renewable energy, Hardy predicts little to no additional wind development for the next two to three years, largely because of that state’s political climate.

Recent legislation that increased California’s already aggressive renewable portfolio standard (RPS) to 33 percent by 2020 also limited the use of out-of-state renewable resources. As a result, when the three California investor-owned utilities held a large renewable procurement in June and July and announced their short lists in August, not a single out-of-state project was listed, Hardy said.

California utilities are “betting the farm on large, in-state solar projects” to meet their RPS requirements, Hardy said. “So the California market, which stimulated the majority of wind development in the Pacific Northwest for the last couple of years, is now closed off for all practical purposes for the next couple of years.”

Hardy said the fate of Northwest wind development will be inversely proportional to the success of California’s solar development. Even if solar projects do not prove feasible, it will take three or four years to demonstrate that, and California utilities will not be buying Northwest wind in the meantime.

Conference participants agreed that both transmission planning and transmission development are needed for long-term growth of renewable energy in the area; however, the other factors that will inhibit renewable energy development over the short term will also delay the need for significant amounts of additional interregional transmission.

“More interregional transmission to California or to British Columbia to [facilitate storage of] excess wind [energy, particularly] in B.C. reservoirs” will eventually be needed, Hardy said, but he noted that is a longer-term solution.

The Pacific Northwest has successfully utilized green energy. But that momentum will be delayed because of the political realities -- the ones that touch upon the sale of the region’s wind generation and the construction of new transmission lines.

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