Some good news for a change, albeit with an albeit

Oregon blazes a trail again, mostly

Posted by JMG (Guest Contributor) at 2:44 PM on 24 May 2007

Read more about: energy | renewable energy | politics | state politics | Oregon

The Oregon House passed an aggressive renewable electricity supply standard that requires the biggest utilities in the state to get 25 percent of their capacity from renewables (not including existing hydro) by 2025. The state Senate already passed the companion bill, and the Oregon governor, Ted Kulongoski, has been pushing these all year, so they are widely expected to pass after the two bills are reconciled into one.

But ...

The downside to these bills are that the "25 percent by '25" target is reduced for smaller electric providers, the rural electric coops that tend to get all their power from Bonneville dams on the Columbia, with maybe a little landfill methane thrown in.

In other words, because these coops have become 100 percent dependent on heavily subsidized federal power for so long, we shouldn't ask them to get with the program and invest in the next generation of renewables. It's kinda of a classic 21st century American thing -- "I'm living off investments made by people who were really struggling, and I don't plan to invest a dime in helping my kids."

This bill is really a sweet deal for the rural areas:

They get all the benefits of the investments that others made when the dams were built (with money from all of us taxpayers) in the 1930s, and they will be first in line to benefit from the required investments in geothermal and wind, but they won't have to meet the same targets that the urbanized areas will.

The rural areas in Oregon are also the ones most at risk and have the most to lose from global heating causing drought, and from warmer winters reducing the snowpack (which is what powers the dams that make their electricity in the summer).

So 'splain to me why should they not be in the same boat as everyone else when it comes to supporting new renewables?

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more splainin

Similarly here in Montana, the rural co-ops are exempt from mandatory requirements for suppliers to buy back power from small landowners who want to sell back into the grid. This makes small-scale solar for the individual homeowner substantially less attractive, since it becomes an all-or-nothing proposition. Why should the rural co-ops be exempt?

by gmunger at 3:00 PM on 24 May 2007

Update:

After further research, it appears that the renewable electric standard of 25% by 2025 will only apply to about 80% of the state's electric load. The remaining 20% is served by small coops.

Those that supply between 0-1.5% of state's electric load only have to do 5% renewables by 2025; the larger ones (that supply between 1.5-3.0% of state's load) only have to do 10% by 2025.

Apparently this is just pure brute force politics; the narrow majority Democrats couldn't pass a bill without support from rural Democrats who refused to vote for the real deal. It seems that the Oregon coop customers are so used to having it all (cheap federally subsidized power), that they won't even consider helping the state meet a moderately aggressive (but readily attainable) goal for new renewables.

There's a fact sheet on the bill here:
www.poweringoregonsfuture.org

It's all right except for the two-tier targets (the final bill has the three outlined above).

The 5% Project

by JMG at 11:50 PM on 24 May 2007

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