a Better Bubble™
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
On Feb. 17, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek released a video assuring Oregonians that Donald Trump would not derail the progressive state’s efforts to combat climate change.
As promised during his presidential campaign, Trump had issued executive orders during his first week in office aimed at halting new sources of wind power and freezing Biden-era funding for renewable energy.
Oregon, Kotek said, had been “leading the way for years on courageous state policies to fight climate change.” Along with neighboring Washington state, Oregon has set an ambitious mandate for electric utilities to be carbon neutral within the next two decades.
“It’s going to take all of us working together finding innovative solutions, no matter the obstacles, to confront the climate crisis,” the governor said, “and we are not turning back.”
But the reality is not nearly as inspiring as Kotek made it sound. For all their progressive claims, Oregon and Washington trail nearly all other states in adding new sources of renewable energy. Iowa, a Republican-led state with roughly the same population and usable volume of wind as Oregon, has built enough wind farms to generate three times as much wind power.
What’s held the Northwest back is a bottleneck Oregon and Washington leaders paid little attention to when they set out to go 100% green, an investigation by ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting found: The region lacks the wiring to deliver new sources of renewable energy to people’s homes, and little has been done to change that.
Northwest leaders left it to a federal agency known as the Bonneville Power Administration to arrange badly needed upgrades to an electrical grid that’s nearly a century old in places.
Bonneville, under a setup that is unique to the Northwest, owns most of the power lines needed to carry green power from the region’s sunny and windy high desert to its major population centers. Bonneville has no state or local representation within its federally appointed bureaucracy and, by statute, operates as a self-funded business.
The agency decides which energy projects can hook up based on whether its infrastructure can handle the extra load, and it decides how quickly that infrastructure gets expanded. Its glacial pace has delayed wind and solar projects under Democratic and Republican presidents alike.
Of the 469 large renewable projects that applied to connect to Bonneville’s grid since 2015, only one has reached approval. Those are longer odds than in any other region of the country, the news organizations found. No major grid operator is as stingy as Bonneville in its approach to financing new transmission lines and substations needed to grow the power supply, according to industry groups that represent power producers.
Efforts to bypass Bonneville didn’t start until this year, when Oregon and Washington legislators considered bills to create their own state bonding authorities for upgrading the region’s high-voltage network.
Both bills died.
Washington and Oregon Trail the Nation in Renewable GrowthChanges in states’ average annual production of power from wind, solar, hydroelectric and geothermal between the decades of 2005-2014 and 2015-2024
(Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration)The grid’s severe constraints are hindering the Northwest at a time when it desperately needs more electricity. Oregon and Washington lawmakers lured power-guzzling data centers with tax breaks in recent years, and the industry has helped drive electricity demand sky high.
Having failed to add enough green-energy sources or any new gas-fired power, the Northwest buys electricity from elsewhere, at high prices, during extreme weather. Rates paid by customers of major Oregon utilities are now 50% higher than five years ago. The worsening energy shortage threatens millions of residents with continual rate hikes and sporadic power outages — not to mention dashing the Northwest’s hopes of drastically reducing its contribution to climate change.
“The people who, technically speaking, are in charge of our transmission system are dropping the ball,” said Oregon state Rep. Mark Gamba, a Democrat who sponsored this year’s failed legislation aimed at creating a state grid improvement authority. “We are absolutely looking at rolling blackouts, and we are absolutely looking at not hitting any of our climate targets when it comes to energy production.”
Kotek declined an interview request. Kotek spokesperson Anca Matica said in a statement that the governor is “open to innovative ideas to increase transmission capacity” and labeled it key to achieving the state’s energy goals. She offered no direct response to questions about Oregon’s lack of progress in boosting renewables.
While Washington and Oregon generate a lot of hydro power, their numbers have trended down over the last decade …Hydroelectric generation by state
… and they’ve added new sources of renewables, such as wind and solar, much more slowly than other states.Renewable energy net generation by state, excluding hydro
(Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration)Reuven Carlyle, the former state senator who crafted Washington’s 2019 decarbonization bill, said he was “deeply cognizant” of the region’s transmission challenges at the time but that plans to address the problem “simply slipped.”
“It’s certainly nothing to be proud of that it didn’t get resolved,” said Carlyle, who founded a consulting firm for climate-focused investments after leaving the Legislature. “And it’s embarrassing that Oregon and Washington, which are such good-looking states, simply can’t practically build anything in terms of energy.”
In the final months of the Biden administration, Bonneville announced a plan to do some grid upgrades, and agency Administrator John Hairston has said the self-funded federal agency is investing in transmission as much as it can without taking on too much debt.
Bonneville responded to written questions from OPB and ProPublica by citing recent improvements to its process for connecting energy projects and noting that it’s not the only player responsible for growing the grid. The agency added that it “remains committed to its critical mission of supporting the region with affordable, reliable and secure power.”
But Bonneville’s latest plans for the grid are in jeopardy. In addition to suspending all new federal wind permits, the Trump White House has added Bonneville to the long list of agencies cutting federal jobs. Three Bonneville employees, requesting anonymity for fear of retribution, said the cuts will make building out the transmission system even harder.
With four years of Joe Biden’s climate activism in the rearview mirror, the Pacific Northwest appears to have blown its best chance to realize its ambitions for renewable power.
Projects in LimboDavid Brown is a case study in the long and agonizing path to breaking ground on a Northwest solar farm.
The Portland energy developer has been in the renewables business since 2003, and his firm, Obsidian Renewables, has a plan to put a vast array of solar panels on a piece of southern Oregon high desert that’s the size of 3,000 football fields. Brown said it’s expected to produce enough energy for about 110,000 homes.
Obsidian will handle everything from acquiring the land to getting permits approved, then look to sell the solar farm to an investor or utility once it’s ready for construction.
But any power plant, whether fueled by coal, wind or sunshine, has to be wired into the electrical grid: a system of transmission lines and transformers that pools electricity and channels it to customers. While power lines crisscross the nation, power mainly gets used within the region that generates it.
As in most parts of the Northwest, the nearest transmission lines Brown could plug into belong to Bonneville. He asked the agency for permission to connect his solar farm to its system in 2020. He doesn’t expect approval until at least 2028.
“I don’t know a single place in Oregon or Washington where I can connect a new solar project and get transmission. Not one,” he said.
One part of the holdup is that Bonneville needs to finish studying what kind of substation it will need to safely let a big new power source into the grid.
Brown’s 400-megawatt solar farm has been through three such “interconnection” studies so far. The first time, Bonneville estimated Brown’s business would need to pay $23 million to build a substation, which Bonneville would own. The second study bumped the price to $70 million. By the third, Brown said, it was $212 million. He said the agency blamed supply chain and labor issues, in part, for the near-tripling in cost over four years.
David Brown’s company, Obsidian Renewables, has proposed to build one of the state’s largest solar farms but has been waiting for five years for Bonneville Power Administration’s approval. (Kristyna Wentz-Graff/Oregon Public Broadcasting)There are hundreds of projects like Brown’s: more than 200,000 megawatts worth of renewable energy awaiting Bonneville’s signoff, or enough to power the Northwest nearly 10 times over. One proposed wind farm has been in Bonneville’s queue for more than 16 years.
Among projects 20 megawatts or bigger that were proposed in the past decade, the only one that made it through Bonneville’s waitlist was an add-on to an existing Portland General Electric wind farm that didn’t require any major transmission upgrades. It won approval in 2022.
The Northwest is not the only region with a backlog of projects waiting to plug in. Grid operators across the country have navigated a deluge of new wind, solar and mass-storage battery requests in recent years. Many applicants proved to be merely testing the waters, with nearly 3 in 4 ultimately pulling their plans, according to Joseph Rand, an energy researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
But other regions managed to sort out problems better than the Northwest, OPB and ProPublica found.
The news organizations used data from Bonneville and from a national database compiled by researchers at the Berkeley Lab to analyze how many large renewable energy projects waiting for grid connections made it to the finish line.
The data showed that for large projects proposed since 2015, Bonneville’s one approval translates to a success rate of 0.2%, the lowest rate of any region. By contrast, about 10% of new applications for major projects in the Midwest and 28% in Texas made it through.
Bonneville has said one reason for the slow progress is that its waitlist is jammed up with too many “speculative” projects — more dream than financial reality. (There’s no evidence that Bonneville has it worse, though; data shows that the share of developers who back out after seeking Bonneville’s approval, 76%, is close to the national average.)
Renewable advocates and energy developers say Bonneville struggles to hire and retain people to process connection requests because the agency pays less than the private sector. In January, Washington U.S. Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat, and Dan Newhouse, a Republican, introduced a bill to make Bonneville’s compensation more competitive, but it hasn’t moved since.
To speed things up, Bonneville has halted new requests for grid connections and changed its approach to reviewing applications. Where specialists used to review proposals one at a time, in the order received, they now plan to prioritize projects that are closest to ready. The agency said the new approach will increase the number of projects that get connected while cutting processing time in half, from an expected 15 years.
Bonneville said in a statement that it is “confident the interconnection reforms we adopted” will prove “sufficient to meet our customers’ needs.”
The changes have not yet helped Brown, who has been awaiting Bonneville’s approval to start work in southern Oregon since 2020. For now, the planned solar project remains in limbo.
“It’s gonna take me years and a couple million dollars to get land use approval,” Brown said, “and why do I want to get land use approval if I don’t know whether or not I have transmission?”
“There’s No Room for Your Project”The predicament Brown and dozens of other wind and solar developers face is a product of the Northwest’s unusual history with electric power.
Oregon and Washington were blessed with powerful rivers fed by abundant snow and rainfall. Beginning in the New Deal era, the federal government built dozens of hydroelectric dams and a sprawling transmission system to electrify the rural West. The region’s energy supply was cheaper and emitted less carbon than the rest of the nation’s. Bonneville was at the helm.
Even today, hydropower supplies almost 35% of Oregon’s electricity and more than 50% of Washington’s, according to the most recent data available.
But hydroelectric dams are a finite and increasingly shaky power source. Output from existing dams dips whenever droughts sap water from the Columbia River basin. New dams are a nonstarter because dams have decimated the region’s salmon populations.
That leaves wind, solar and battery storage as the most promising places for the Northwest to turn as it approaches self-imposed deadlines to fully wean utilities off electricity that comes from oil, coal or gas.
Bonneville has now become a barrier to accommodating the new power sources, six green energy developers told OPB and ProPublica.
An agency that erected more than 4,800 miles of high-voltage transmission lines from 1960 to 1990 built fewer than 500 miles from 1990 to 2020. In the past five years, it built 1.
Bonneville has the ability to borrow money, at low interest rates, for projects that would enable the grid to carry more power. Congress pushed the agency to do so in 2021, more than doubling Bonneville’s debt limit specifically to finance transmission upgrades.
The chairs of the Oregon and Washington public utility commissions, in a joint 2022 letter, urged Bonneville to spend the money: “The region needs BPA to be a leader in delivering a transmission system that serves the entire region.”
Bonneville, however, has been reluctant to take on debt. It is still paying off billions of dollars in bonds from failed nuclear plants in the 1970s. As recently as 2019, the agency’s finances were so poor that some economists expected it to become insolvent.
Bonneville’s transmission planners, for their part, have told OPB and ProPublica in previous interviews that they want to avoid building expensive transmission lines that no one ends up using.
“We can’t speculate and build a transmission line to nowhere,” Jeff Cook, the agency’s vice president for transmission planning, said in May 2024.
First image: Contractors repair a transformer box in Portland, Oregon. Second image: Solar panels on the Wheatridge farm, the only project Bonneville approved out of the hundreds that applied for a grid connection in the past decade. (Kristyna Wentz-Graff/Oregon Public Broadcasting)When Bonneville announced in the fall it would tap some of its expanded debt limit to help pay for $5 billion in transmission upgrades over a decade, renewable energy advocates characterized the work as long overdue maintenance that wouldn’t provide the expansion the grid needs.
Most of the work Bonneville announced was “the equivalent of fixing potholes, installing some new round-abouts, doing some repaving,” Spencer Gray, executive director of the Northwest & Intermountain Power Producers Coalition, said in an email.
A further frustration for wind and solar developers that is unique to Bonneville: The grid operator makes them absorb an outsize share of the cost for projects that help the transmission network accommodate their electricity — and it requires a big deposit up front. That’s true even if the new power lines benefit a wide network and will be around for many generations of customers.
“Lately, the answer to these individual developers has been, ‘There’s no room for your project. If you want to put this project on our system, it’s going to cost you this many millions of dollars to help us upgrade the system,’” said Sarah Edmonds, president of a coalition of utilities known as the Western Power Pool.
The approach, Edmonds said, has had “a chilling effect on the ability of developers to get their projects online.”
Michelle Manary, Bonneville’s vice president of transmission marketing and sales, said requiring up-front deposits keeps existing ratepayers from getting stuck with the tab if a developer backs out and that Bonneville has begun work on a transmission upgrade. She said other regions have more control over who pays these costs because their entire distribution networks are under one operator. Bonneville’s transmission lines are more like highways, from which electric utilities serve as exit ramps that deliver power the last mile to Northwest neighborhoods.
Manary denied that Bonneville’s current way of allocating costs has stifled green energy projects. But she acknowledged the agency needs to reevaluate its policy amid the flood of applications for new projects, and she said that process is underway.
“Texas Is Kicking Our Ass”The rest of the nation has taken a different approach to bringing green power online — with better outcomes.
In most parts of the country, each grid has a central, independent operator, known as a regional transmission organization, typically run by a board that represents customers, electric utilities and other groups. Bonneville recently rejected joining a California-based energy market that advocates described as the Northwest’s best bet at accelerating the adoption of renewables.
In Texas, which runs its own grid, large renewable projects applying to connect in the past decade took a median of 19 months to get the green light, or nearly two years less than the one project Bonneville approved in that time frame. California and the Midwest were also faster than Bonneville.
Texas doesn’t require project-by-project grid upgrades the way other grid operators do. It essentially tells developers it will connect their project, and then it figures out how to balance the added electricity after the fact.
Texas and other regional grid operators spend billions more than Bonneville on transmission upgrades annually, and they spread the costs across a wider swath of customers than Bonneville does. (Bonneville says the federal agency differs so much from regional operators that they’re not a fair comparison group.)
Texas brought more energy online in the past two years than any other power region. That’s helped the oil and gas powerhouse become the country’s biggest producer of wind and solar energy. Last year alone it added more than enough renewable energy to power the entire Northwest.
“Texas is kicking our ass,” said Gamba, the Oregon state representative.
Oil well pumps and wind turbines in Lamesa, Texas, in February (Julio Cortez/AP)Northwest lawmakers were told that they’d need to find effective ways of confronting their region’s aging transmission system if they wished to phase out coal and natural gas.
As Washington lawmakers debated a mandate for renewable power in 2019, Nicholas Garcia of the Washington Public Utility Districts Association testified that replacing coal plants with wind and solar would require “more transmission, significantly more transmission.”
In 2021, when Oregon lawmakers debated their own mandate for carbon-free energy, Republicans also raised concerns that the state’s transmission lines were maxed out. It became one more GOP argument against the bill, in addition to saying more should be done to ensure green energy projects were built in Oregon.
Numerous reports — from the Oregon and U.S. departments of energy, for example — supported the assertion that heftier transmission lines were needed.
Bonneville would be key to meeting that need, with one utilities lobbyist calling Bonneville’s grid “the backbone for decarbonization” in testimony to Oregon lawmakers.
But Oregon state Rep. Pam Marsh, who led the 2021 effort, said in a recent interview she was focused on getting utilities to cut their carbon emissions and that green energy advocates weren’t demanding transmission improvements at the time.
“I was not thinking personally about the role that Bonneville might play in this,” said Marsh, a Democrat representing southern Oregon.
Washington’s Legislature took some action on the need for better transmission: It required the state to study the issue. The resulting 2022 report concluded that the grid was indeed inadequate but led to little in the way of solutions. Instead, lawmakers decided to require utilities to plan out transmission needs 20 years ahead rather than 10, and they created a statewide environmental review in hopes of streamlining the state’s approval process for transmission. It did nothing about impediments posed by Bonneville.
The Legislature was “a little complacent” about relying on Bonneville to upgrade the grid, said Sen. Sharon Shewmake, a freshman lawmaker in 2019 when Washington enacted its energy mandate.
Shewmake and Gamba both introduced legislation this year following states like Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota and Wyoming in creating independent authorities to finance transmission infrastructure. Gamba said he led an 80-person group of interested parties through 18 months of drafting. Democratic Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson labeled Shewmake’s bill a priority.
The legislation didn’t make it through either state’s Democrat-controlled legislatures, however.
Brown, the energy developer who’s been awaiting Bonneville’s solar approval since 2020, said the future of the Northwest’s energy dreams looks dim.
“We don’t have a prayer of meeting our heralded, flag-waving renewable energy goals,” he said. “The dialogue will be to blame Trump; it won’t be to blame ourselves for poor planning and extremely low expectations.”
Ellis Simani assisted with data analysis.
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