PGE closed its last Oregon-based coal-fired power plant in October 2020, 20 years ahead of schedule, as part of an agreement with stakeholders, customer groups, and regulators to significantly reduce air emissions from power production in Oregon. PGE still receives a small amount of coal-fired power from the Colstrip plant, which is located near Billings, Montana. The company has an ownership stake in the facility, but it plans to exit its ownership in Colstrip no later than 2029.The sheer folly of this is infuriating. There is NO NEED to "decarbonize." They chirpily say "we have to decarbonize without making power unaffordable and unreliable" but there are NO TECHNOLOGIES EXTANT that can do that. They 20 year prematurely shut down a perfectly good, reliable, clean, and low-cost coal plant with no replacement available. Finally, that paragraph immediately above drops the bombshell that PGE, a vertically integrated utility, can no longer produce the power it needs to sell. It has to "procure" from other sources and I expect many of those sources will be from outside Oregon.Up to this point in time, decarbonization has primarily been done with wind, solar, and batteries, and it’s not a new thing for PGE. The company’s first wind farm—the Biglow Canyon site—began operation in 2007. Meanwhile, in 2012, PGE opened the Camino del Sol Solar Station, an interstate highway solar project. Since then, the company has partnered with schools, government agencies, and corporations to grow solar energy throughout Oregon. In partnership with NextEra Energy Resources, it also opened North America’s first major renewable energy facility to combine wind, solar, and battery storage in one location—the Wheatridge Renewable Energy Facility in Morrow County. Today, PGE boasts having more than 1 GW of wind power capacity in service in the Northwest, and it aims to procure between 3.5 GW and 4.5 GW of new non-emitting resources and storage between now and 2030.
Lastly, Oregon is losing population. I'm seeing a strong correlation between states pursuing their Green Wet Dreams and population loss.
Oregon population decline is cause for concern, say economists
By Allison Frost, Oregon Public Broadcasting
Jan. 5, 2023
Why would population decline concern economists? They want to decarbonize...why not depopulationize? That's what the greeniacs really want.
Bkmk
Oh my, Oregon is losing population. Go figure, woke and morally better than anyone else, their leaders are well, just STUPID sheeple.
How cold does it get in Oregon?
Writing the book ‘How To Go Bankrupt In 6 Years’
Of course it is impossible to achieve this goal without rolling blackouts as a common occurrence.
40 years ago when coal was king, rolling blackouts were a rare occurrence anywhere in the US.
Now the threat of it is a yearly thing on the Left Coast.
“Perhaps more difficult than decarbonizing the system, however, is doing so while also maintaining reliability, affordability, and an equitable system for all its customers. “It’s a very interesting point in time—an inflection point for the industry,” Sheeran said. “How do you balance affordability? How do you balance reliability with emissions reduction?” she asked.”
These are VERY SCARY words coming from this babe. If any FReepers are left in Oregon, they had BETTER understand the meaning of “affordability” and “equitable”, as it means that they WILL NOT be paying the same price for electricity as their migrant neighbors, but likely several times more. Based on what I’m seeing in Europe, the ‘well off’ (meaning not eating mud for dinner) will be paying close to $1.00 per kWh when this babe completes her plan - so go look at one of your electric bill and apply $1.00/kWh and you’ll have a good idea as to what you’ll be paying in 5 to 10 years (at most).
The other option, of course, it to mostly get off the grid, which should keep your bill under about $200/month, as they will still wallop you with charges for being connected to the grid and even that sip of power you use will drive up your bill drastically.
Turn out the lights, the party’s over……
We need to shutter every public school system in America. Ban any current education union member from teaching. This is where this mass insanity starts.
People in Appalachia are screaming about rate hikes and AEP is shutting down coal plants. The people are contacting the government to stop rate hikes. The government is allowing rate hikes to pay for new power sources because the European Oligarchs are paying politicians to institute unreliable power to control the population in the name of “Global Warming”
Portland is sooooo doomed in sooo many ways.
Standard reason...the left touched it, and the left will eff it.
Why wait? 2030? Cut all -— ALL — the carbon-based energy production and supply NOW. Show us how it’s done! Why wait? < s a r c >
They should just shut down all generating plants and national gas transmission. Then they could get a buck stove. Oh, no that won’t work. What to do, what to do?
Meanwhile, 150K+ Portlanders went without electric power for days during the most recent snow and ice storm.
They could decarbonize the power grid today. Just throw all the breakers and lock them open, shut down all the generators, and invite the BLM crowd to “salvage” the copper windings.
Done and dusted.
Complete idiots. This will be a total failure.
Decarbonize on a Carbon based planet , how crazy is that ,LOL
They don't "balance" affordability; they hide the costs via subsidy schemes. The key question for the enviros is how to camouflage the subsidies to make them invisible to the public and avoid accountability for the politicians.
Balancing reliability and emissions reduction? Mainly they will condition people to accept intermittent outages as the new normal.
That’s a pretty ambitious 26 year plan considering we have less than 7 years left.
EC
From one of the linked articles:
“Numbers from the Portland State University Population Research Center indicate a slowing of growth in the state, but also show a drop in the Portland metro area.”
Portland is very liberal, with consequences. Maybe they aren’t counting the homeless who came from California for more generous handouts.
However, I wonder about de-population in general due to Wuhan virus and, worse yet, the mRNA shots. Where I live in Florida, restaurant seating in Carrabba’s restaurant seems more plentiful. Chili’s used to be too loud. Maybe I should give it another try. I remember that every time a dominoe fell to communism in Southeast Asia, new ethnic restaurants opened in the US. I’m sad to say that the silver lining is a mere sliver.
Communists are really good at solving imaginary problems.
1. Steal underpants.
2. ????
3. Profit!