BY PAT DELAQUIL and JOHN PERONA Feb 11, 2025
A recent guest column in the Bulletin used a story — that the city of Bend might regulate natural gas hookups for new residential construction as one way of achieving its climate goals — to speculate on the ability of the Northwest’s electricity grid to meet growing demand from data centers and EVs. The writer expressed concern that carbon-free sources of electricity will not suffice to prevent damaging power outages, and concluded that it is too soon to move towards eliminating natural gas in new homes.
We hold a different view. The writer’s main argument against restricting new gas hookups is that wind and solar energy are not baseload power, and that the large-scale deployment of energy storage is still decades away. This perspective comes from a traditional, highly centralized model of the electricity system. Yet that paradigm is currently giving way to a very different reality with two main elements: an integrated regional grid with transmission lines connecting Oregon to other Western states, and a host of distributed local community networks with their own capacities to generate and store electricity.
This newly emerging design of our electric power system will provide much more reliability, greatly reducing concerns about blackouts. For example, an expanded regional grid will allow wind from Montana and solar from Nevada to mitigate local variations in the solar and wind resources here in Oregon. Importantly, such a regional Western grid also provides resilience in the face of increasingly damaging storms and other natural disasters.
Just as important, increasing the amounts of generation and storage integrated into our local community distribution system will significantly reduce power demands on the Western regional grid — especially in the near term. Rooftop solar panels, smart appliances, and bidirectional EV chargers, together with residential solar batteries and local energy storage substations can greatly moderate peak electricity demands, reducing the need for new transmission capacity. Contrary to the statement in the guest opinion, utility-scale battery energy systems are already commercially operating in many locations across the country.
Certainly, there are areas of our economy where all electric technologies are not suitable, such as aviation and heavy industry. Additionally, there are other climate solutions like carbon capture and storage or low-carbon fuels that need to be included in our climate solution portfolio to achieve net zero and long term atmospheric drawdown. None of this, however, discounts the urgency that is needed to electrify where we have solutions readily available. Namely, electrifying the vehicles we use to get around and the appliances we use to heat our homes. This is reaffirmed by authoritative reports from dozens of groups studying solutions to address and mitigate the effects of the climate crisis.
These studies also deliver two important messages for policymakers in Bend. First, they show that meeting climate targets requires phasing out fossil natural gas (methane) by 2050. Second, they highlight that electrification is the most cost-effective method for decarbonizing buildings and light industry where feasible. Local policymakers need to make careful plans for measured and systematic decreases in gas dependence that will allow us to meet climate targets and protect consumers from bearing the burden of rate increases.