This editorial was published in the Yakima Herald-Republic.
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There was a time when the Pacific Northwest was a land of tall forests, sweeping farmlands and free-flowing rivers.
It was, as Oregon’s license plates once proclaimed, the “Pacific Wonderland.”
But many of the massive trees that helped shape the skyline for centuries have been felled, and large swaths of farmland have been subdivided to make way for tract housing, strip malls or exclusive resorts for the wealthy.
And for better or worse, those free-flowing rivers — most notably the once-mighty Columbia — have been harnessed for flood control and hydropower.
Aesthetics and ruminations aside, the Great Northwest is still great, but it’s not unlimited.
That’s the hard reality we’re confronting as new housing and — most significantly — sprawling data centers and other technology-driven development continues to devour land and electricity.
“There is no question in my mind that the demand for computation and AI and the demand to plug in (graphics processing units) exceeds the available power that we have by 2030,” data center developer Brian Janous told the Northwest Power and Conservation Council last month.
Janous, former vice president of energy for Microsoft, was among a group of power experts who met with the regional council, which generates 20-year power plans to keep the lights on in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana.
The three-hour discussion wasn’t exactly reassuring.
But the message was clear: We’ll be using more energy than we produce in just five years, so we need to get on the stick and figure out what to do — now.
Some of the reason for the accelerating demand is that new technology takes even more electricity. The growth of AI and other energy-eaters is placing greater and greater strains on the region’s power grid.
Hydropower fills roughly half of Washington’s electricity needs, followed distantly by coal and gas, wind and solar. Nobody’s building any new dams, and as we’ve seen all too vividly in recent years, droughts are an ever-present worry.
So where’s all this new electricity that we’ll need supposed to come from?
If the next administration gets its way, calls for more climate-threatening energy sources — such as coal plants — will likely get louder. Other corners will keep pushing for more wind and solar.
Still others are apt to urge a new imagining of nuclear power — state Republican leaders have promoted further exploration of localized, small-scale nuclear plants. Eastern Washington would be a prime spot for the plants, which could be built in clusters that, together, would produce significant amounts of electricity.
But as state Senate Republican Leader John Braun noted in an interview with the Herald-Republic this week, getting them up and running would take 10 to 15 years.
We’re skeptical that anyone will come up with a silver-bullet solution in the next five years, though Braun thinks new natural-gas plants might offer the most realistic immediate option.
Meantime, we’d urge local governments to think carefully before automatically approving new projects that would hog even more power. That’s a tough ask in some communities, where tattered economies desperately need the infusions of cash that developers always promise.
If the power isn’t there to keep new plants or expansions running, however, the promises can’t be kept anyway.
At any rate, we’re hopeful that the Northwest Power and Conservation Council and other public and private entities are making the coming crisis a today-without-delay priority.
We’d hate to see the great Northwest compromised any further.
TNS