Is The Oregonian Prescient About the Boardman to Hemmingway Power Project

In Monday’s online edition, The Oregonian published a story speculating that a 300 mile power line from Idaho into Oregon was likely to be redirected from serving the general public to serving a data storage facility. As the Oregonian noted:

“This summer, after nearly 20 years of planning, permitting and lawsuits construction finally launched on a new electrical transmission line set to run nearly 300 miles across five Oregon counties and into Idaho – one of Oregon’s largest transmission projects in decades.

“But Irene Gilbert, a retiree from La Grande who over the years has repeatedly challenged the Boardman-to-Hemmingway project – B2H for short – wasn’t ready to back down.

“She found what she considered a concerning switcheroo – the line’s co-owner, investor owned PacificCorp, no longer intends to sell the power to its 805,000 customers but [rather] to a private industrial user, most likely a data center.” [Bracketed words provided]

Now, I don’t know whether there is a word of truth – including the articles – a, an, and the in this story – or just another example of sloppy journalism where rumor or baseless accusations substitute for facts, For my purposes, however, it is replete with the specific reasons why business and industry – particularly the high tech industry – should be moving rapidly towards individual power sources – such as “small, modular reactors.” Let’s take a look at the reasons.

The Oregonians articles noted that this power line project has been in the “planning, permitting, and lawsuits” phase for twenty years and it is yet to turn its first shovel of dirt. Outrageous! Those “planning, permitting and lawsuits” have focused on virtually everything but the delivery of power to consumers – its primary mission. Those reviews will have focused on birds and blades of grass, toads and toad stools and diversity, equity and inclusion as if electrons give a damn about social issues best addressed by the legislature rather than faceless bureaucrats and a public utility commission that knows even less about such issues than it does of generating and delivering power.

The nation’s utility commissions were created as a means to insure that the nation’s utilities delivered service on a timely basis for reasonable rates – the latter being a necessity since the utilities were all monopolies and thus unburdened by the discipline of the free market to do just that – delivery of service on a timely basis at reasonable prices. But all of that went out the window when the government intervened to promote its societal goals. So while the regulatory commissions were able to use accounting tricks to keep telephone rates artificially low, those same regulatory commissions drove up the cost of power by requiring utilities to utilize alternate energy sources such as wind, solar, and thermal while simultaneously working to eliminate the most dependable sources – nuclear and hydroelectric power.

Not only did they drive up prices for electrical energy, they forced those who would use where they could locate – by controlling when, where and how the transmission facilities were located. The net result was a closed network that drove investment growth towards the locations of the grid – not surprisingly to the metropolitan areas at the expense of rural communities that had plentiful sites but marginal electricity. Given the choice between cheap land and waiting for ten to fifteen ears for power generating facilities to add capacity and transmission facilities, the nation’s industrialists routinely chose large cities where the electrical power already existed. A classic example of that was the so-called B-to-H transmission facilities – twenty years in the making and still not a shovel of dirt turned in furtherance of the project.

And finally – and this relates back to comments by Gov. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) in speeches she has made embracing the small modular reactors.  Ms. Ayotte noted that most of the SMRs were scalable and could be sized to meet current needs and probable growth. Most importantly she noted that they could be built and deployed much more rapidly than the utilities could under regulatory limitations. As a condition for allowing construction of these SMRs she barred them from connecting to the grid – first to prevent unfair competition with the highly regulated power companies and second to ensure that the costs of the SMRs do not fall back on general consumers as is the case with general power investments (included those in the failing alternative energy mandates).

So, if in fact the Oregonian’s article is at all accurate, it should be viewed as a wake-up call to Oregon regulators and legislators to encourage investment in SMR to protect general consumers from bearing the cost of growth in the energy supply and delivery which is destined for a minority of high tech customers and from bearing the risk of diminished service to general customers based on new demand by industry.

So maybe, just maybe, the utility regulators and the legislators can turn away from social experiments like DEI and the green energy to focus on the balance between demand and availability of electricity. And do it without imposing the same mindless regulations on the SMR industry as it does no the large power and transmission companies.

But don’t hold your breath – Oregon’s liberal progressives can’t wait to regulate another business into immateriality.