Electricity demand will rise much faster than overall energy growth in the coming decades, underscoring the need for diversified energy sources, according to an analysis released Wednesday.

The report by the International Energy Agency ����������renewable energy, led by solar power, will grow faster than any other major source in the next few years. One scenario the agency anticipates is coal and oil demand peaking globally by the end of this decade — but the group also said global oil and gas demand could continue growing until 2050. The report noted that many natural gas projects were approved in 2025, due to changes in U.S. policy, indicating worldwide supply will rise even as questions remain about how it will be used. Meanwhile, global nuclear power capacity is set to increase by at least a third by 2035 after being stagnant for years.

The release of the annual World Energy Outlook coincided with U.N. negotiations in Brazil, where global leaders this week are calling for ways to curb climate change.

The IEA says building greater resilience in energy systems is especially important as data centers, heating and cooling, electrification and more drive energy demand. Investment in data centers is expected to reach $580 billion this year, exceeding investment in the oil supply, according to the report.

Growing economies including India and nations in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, will “increasingly shape energy market dynamics in the years,” the IEA said, noting their potential for solar power.

China, meanwhile, has accounted for half the global growth in demand for oil and gas, and more than half for electricity, since 2010.

“In a break from the trend of the past decade, the increase in electricity consumption is no longer limited to emerging and developing economies,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol stated in a release. Electricity use is also rising in advanced economies, according to Birol.

Nations are grappling with meeting demand while preparing for the risks brought on by climate change. The IEA says the world is falling short on universal energy access and climate change goals. Around 730 million people still live without electricity, according to the IEA, and despite progress, nearly one-quarter of the global population still relies on inefficient cooking methods that hurt their health or the environment. 2024 was also the hottest year on record.

Nations should diversify their energy sources and cooperate to expand supply chains for critical minerals used to make things like batteries for electric vehicles and components for solar and wind power generation, the IEA said. This also includes making quick improvements to the grid, energy storage and broader infrastructure.

“When we look at the history of the energy world in recent decades, there is no other time when energy security tensions have applied to so many fuels and technologies at once,” Birol said. “With energy security front and (center) for many governments, their responses need to consider the synergies and trade-offs that can arise with other policy goals — on affordability, access, competitiveness and climate change.”

The IEA brought back an approach to this year’s outlook using what it calls current policies. It used this approach in 2019 to weigh different possible global energy outcomes, before better aligning with clean energy transition plans. This year the agency’s outlook includes the possibility of essentially regressing on the phase-out of fossil fuels.

In a conference call Wednesday, Birol said: “We will still use oil. We will still use gas. But the growth of electricity demand is spectacular.”

He noted the role transportation plays in accounting for 45 percent of global oil consumption, for example. “How the electrification of the transportation takes place, especially in countries beyond China and Europe, will determine the shape of the oil demand and growth.”

Wednesday’s edition of the yearly report is the first released since the start of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term. Trump’s administration has for a second time opted out of the Paris agreement, rolled back dozens of climate regulations, slashed federal support for renewable energies such as wind and solar power and is reversing the “endangerment finding” that sits at the core of U.S. climate policy.

Trump has pledged his support instead to the fossil fuel industry, investing in coal and loosening restrictions on pollution.

But energy analysts said the shift to clean power is happening regardless of climate policy around the world.

“The evidence on the ground is overwhelming,” said Dave Jones, chief analyst at global energy think tank Ember. “EV sales are taking off in many emerging countries, solar is permeating even through the Middle East. Renewables and electrification will dominate the future.”

Maria Pastukhova, energy transition program lead at climate change think tank E3G, said the report makes “the choices for the global energy system and the global economy unambiguous.”

Others, however, were critical of how the outlook addressed oil and gas. Ben Backwell, CEO of the Global Wind Energy Council, said the outlook does not fully capture the momentum in renewables, and that it should have emphasized the trajectory for renewable energy is accelerating, driven by the decreasing cost of the technologies, strong policy support and the move toward electrification.

“We’re accelerating,” he added. “You can see it all around the world and we can see it in our numbers for last year, but also in our numbers for the first half of this year. It looks very, very exciting, both for wind and for solar, in fact, and for next year, even more so.”

The IEA addressed some of the criticism in the call Wednesday. It said that it sees differences economically, politically and regarding clean energy efforts across the globe, and that its analysis tries to account for those differences.

“In a nutshell, the IEA is backsliding,” said Stephan Singer, global energy senior adviser at CAN International, a global network of environmental organizations. “As a global think tank, the IEA has largely failed to represent where most countries in the (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) and the developing world are, as they’re supporting net zero emissions with 98 percent CO2 emissions reductions by mid-century.”

Editor’s note: Associated Press reporters Jennifer McDermott in Providence, Rhode Island, and Sibi Arasu in Bengaluru contributed to this report.

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The Trump administration is canceling plans to use large areas of federal waters for new offshore wind development — the latest step to suppress the industry in the United States.

More than 3.5 million acres had been designated wind energy areas, as offshore locations deemed most suitable for development. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is now rescinding all designated wind energy areas in federal waters, announcing on Wednesday an end to setting aside large areas for “speculative wind development.”

Offshore wind lease sales were anticipated off the coasts of Texas, Louisiana, Maine, New York, California and Oregon, as well as in the central Atlantic. The Biden administration last year had announced a five-year schedule to lease federal offshore tracts for wind energy production.

Trump began reversing the country’s energy policies after taking office in January. A series of executive orders took aim at increasing oil, gas and coal production. Another early executive order temporarily halted offshore wind lease sales in federal waters and paused the issuance of approvals, permits and loans for all wind projects.

The bureau said it was acting in accordance with Trump’s action and an order by his interior secretary this week to end any preferential treatment toward wind and solar facilities, which were described as unreliable, foreign-controlled energy sources.

Robin Shaffer, president of Protect Our Coast NJ, applauded the administration for its actions and said they were long overdue. Opponents of offshore wind projects are particularly vocal and organized in New Jersey.

“It’s hard to believe these projects ever got this far because of the immensity, scale, scope and expense, compared to relatively cheap and reliable forms of onshore power,” he said Thursday. “We’re nearly there, but we haven’t reached the finish line yet.”

The Sierra Club said the administration’s “relentless obstruction of wind energy” shows it does not care about creating affordable, reliable energy for everyday Americans.

“No matter how much they want to bolster their buddies in the dirty fossil fuel industry, we will continue to push for the cleaner, healthier, and greener future we deserve,” Xavier Boatright, Sierra Club’s deputy legislative director for clean energy and electrification, stated.

Attorneys general from 17 states and the District of Columbia are suing in federal court to challenge Trump’s executive order halting leasing and permitting for wind energy projects. His administration had also halted work on a major offshore wind project for New York but allowed it to resume in May.

The nation’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm, a 12-turbine facility called South Fork, opened last year east of Montauk Point, New York.

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DIAMOND BAR, Calif. — Air quality regulators in Southern California earlier this month voted 7 to 5 to reject proposed rules that would have curbed harmful emissions from gas-powered furnaces and water heaters. But the majority voted to send the rules back to the committee to be changed and reconsidered.

The proposal aimed to reduce emissions of smog-contributing nitrogen oxides, also called NOx. They are a group of pollutants linked to respiratory issues, asthma attacks, worse allergies, decreased lung function in children, premature death and more. Burning natural gas is also one of the primary drivers of climate change.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District estimates that the proposed rules would have lowered NOx emissions from gas-fired furnaces, preventing about 2,490 premature deaths and 10,200 new asthma cases over a 26-year period in the region. The district regulates air quality for 16.8 million people in Southern California, including all of Orange County and large areas of Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties — one of the smoggiest areas in the U.S.

The board received more than 30,000 written comments ahead of the vote, including a letter from U.S. Attorney Bilal “Bill” Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in the area, in which he threatened to sue the board if it adopted the proposed rules.

“California regulators are on notice: if you pass illegal bans or penalties on gas appliances, we’ll see you in court,” he posted Thursday on the social platform X. “The law is clear—feds set energy policy, not unelected climate bureaucrats.”

Before the vote, board member Janet Nguyen, who serves on the Orange County Board of Supervisors, echoed opponents’ concerns that the rules would financially burden people.

“I, like everybody here, support clean air,” she said. “These rules don’t target refineries or shopping ports. They target people — the 17 million homeowners, renters, seniors and small businesses.”

Los Angeles County Supervisor Holly J. Mitchell, who supported the proposed rules, said, “If we don’t start now, when will we effect any change?”

California is moving aggressively to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels ahead of a 2045 mandate for the state to have net-zero carbon emissions. California often sets or proposes stricter environmental standards than the rest of the country, such as a bid to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035.

The proposed rules would have set targets aiming to phase out the sale of gas-powered furnaces and water heaters starting in 2027. It would not have applied to gas stoves. The sales target would have started at 30 percent, then grown to 50 percent in 2029 and ended at 90 percent in 2039. The rules would not have been mandated, but manufacturers would have had to pay fees ranging from $50 to $500 if they sold gas-powered appliances.

That’s a significant rollback from the original proposal, which would have required residential buildings to meet zero-emissions standards beginning in 2029 when appliances need to be replaced. The agency amended the rules after strong opposition from Southern California Gas and other businesses.

The regulations would have impacted more than 10 million appliances in an estimated 5 million buildings, most of them residential.

Officials and supporters say the proposed rules would have reduced air pollution and substantially improved public health. But opponents — including property owners, industry professionals and natural gas companies — feared potentially higher costs for consumers and businesses, and a strained power grid with more electric appliances.

During a packed June 6 board meeting that ran for five hours, board chair Vanessa Delgado thanked the more than 200 people who signed up to speak about the proposed rules, which took more than two years to craft.

“I don’t believe that there’s necessarily a good or right answer about these rules,” she said. “I believe that it is very complicated, and I know that every single one of these board members are doing what is right to move forward air quality goals in our region.”

Lynwood City Councilmember Juan Muñoz-Guevara said the rules would be a long-overdue step toward environmental justice for communities like his.

“I’ve seen firsthand how families in my community are forced to live with the health consequences of dirty air,” he said. “Our children grow up with asthma, our elders struggle with respiratory illness, and too many lives are cut short. Gas appliances in our home are one of the largest sources of smog-forming pollution in the region. We cannot meet clean air goals without tackling this.”

Peggy Huang, a member of Yorba Linda’s City Council, urged the board to reject the proposed rules.

“As someone who’s been advocating for affordable housing, this will increase costs for us to meet those goals,” she said.

Chino’s mayor pro tem, Curtis Burton, echoed some of Huang’s concerns. He said the rules would “create an additional financial burden on residents and businesses.”

Air quality regulators say the rules would save consumers money by reducing energy bills.

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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court backed a multibillion-dollar oil railroad expansion proposal in Utah on Thursday in a ruling that scales back the use of a key environmental law and could accelerate development projects around the country.

The 8-0 decision followed an appeal to the high court from backers of the project, which aims to quadruple oil production in a remote area of sandstone and sagebrush.

The decision will have a sweeping impact on National Environmental Policy Act reviews, environmental groups said. President Donald Trump’s administration has already said it’s working to support his January declaration of a “national energy emergency” and his vow to boost U.S. oil and gas production.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh referred to the decision as a “course correction” in an opinion fully joined by four conservative colleagues.

“Congress did not design NEPA for judges to hamstring new infrastructure and construction projects,” Kavanaugh wrote. The three liberal justices agreed the Utah project should gain approval, but they would have taken a narrower path.

The justices reversed a lower court decision that required a more thorough environmental review and restored an important approval from federal regulators on the Surface Transportation Board.

The board’s chair, Patrick Fuchs, said the ruling reins in the scope of environmental reviews that are “unnecessarily hindering” infrastructure construction throughout the country.

The case centers on the Uinta Basin Railway project, a proposed 88-mile expansion that would connect the oil-rich region of northeast Utah to the national rail network, allowing oil and gas producers to access larger markets. The state’s crude oil production was valued at $4.1 billion in 2024, according to a Utah Geological Survey report, and could increase substantially via the expansion project.

Construction, though, does not appear to be imminent. Project leaders must win additional approvals and secure funding from private-sector partners before they can break ground, Uinta Basin Railway spokesperson Melissa Cano said.

Environmental groups and a Colorado county had argued that regulators must consider a broad range of potential impacts when they consider new development, such as increased wildfire risk, the effect of additional crude oil production from the area and increased refining in Gulf Coast states.

The justices, though, found that regulators were right to consider the direct effects of the project, rather than the wider upstream and downstream impacts. Kavanaugh wrote that courts should defer to regulators on “where to draw the line” on factors to consider.

“The goal of the law is to inform agency decision-making, not to paralyze it,” he said.

The court has taken steps to curtail the power of federal regulators in other cases, however. For instance, it struck down the decades-old Chevron doctrine that made it easier for the federal government to set a wide range of regulations.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in a concurrence that the court could have simply cleared the way for the railway approval by saying that regulators did not need to consider increased fossil fuel production tied to the project.

Justice Neil Gorsuch did not participate in the case after facing calls to step aside over ties to Philip Anschutz, a Colorado billionaire whose ownership of oil wells in the area means he could benefit if the project goes through. Gorsuch, as a lawyer in private practice, previously represented Anschutz.

The Trump administration announced last month it’s accelerating environmental reviews of projects required under the same law at the center of the Utah case, compressing a process that typically takes a year or more into just weeks.

“The court’s decision gives agencies a green light to ignore the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their decisions and avoid confronting them,” said Sambhav Sankar, senior vice president of programs at Earthjustice.

Wendy Park, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said opponents would continue to fight the Utah project.

“This disastrous decision to undermine our nation’s bedrock environmental law means our air and water will be more polluted, the climate and extinction crises will intensify, and people will be less healthy,” she said.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, said the ruling affirms a “balanced approach” to environmental oversight. He praised the railroad expansion as a critical infrastructure project that will help “restore America’s energy independence” and bolster the state’s rural economy.

The project’s public partner also applauded the ruling.

“It represents a turning point for rural Utah — bringing safer, sustainable, more efficient transportation options, and opening new doors for investment and economic stability,” said Keith Heaton, director of the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition.

Editor’s note: Schoenbaum reported from Salt Lake City.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The multitrillion-dollar tax breaks package passed by House Republicans early Thursday would gut clean energy tax credits that Democrats approved three years ago while supporting increased mining, drilling and other traditional energy production.

A marathon session that began Wednesday resulted in 1,100-plus page legislation that curbs billions of dollars in spending across food assistance, student loans, Medicaid and action to address climate change.

The bill, which now heads to the Senate, repeals or phases out more quickly clean energy tax credits passed in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act during former President Joe Biden’s term. Biden’s climate law has been considered monumental for the clean energy transition, but the House bill effectively renders moot much of the law’s incentives for renewable energy such as wind and solar power.

Clean energy advocates said the bill walks back the largest government investment in clean energy in history.

“In a bid to cut taxes for billionaires and provide a grab bag of goodies to Big Oil, the majority in the House took a sledgehammer to clean energy tax credits and to the protection of our public lands,” said Christy Goldfuss, executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“These credits are delivering billions of dollars in new investments in homegrown American energy — creating jobs, lowering energy costs and addressing the climate crisis that is fueling floods, fires and heat waves,” Goldfuss said.

President Donald Trump celebrated the bill’s passage, calling it “arguably the most significant piece of Legislation that will ever be signed in the History of our Country.” Trump appealed to the Senate to pass the measure as soon as possible and send it to his desk.

The Senate hopes to wrap up its version by early July. At least four Republican senators, led by Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, have urged continuation of energy tax credits, including support for traditional and renewable energy sources. Republican-led states and Congressional districts have benefited from billions of dollars in clean energy manufacturing investments spurred by the Biden-era subsidies.

Full-scale repeal of current credits “could lead to significant disruptions for the American people and weaken our position as a global energy leader,” the senators said in a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D.

“A wholesale repeal, or the termination of certain individual credits, would create uncertainty, jeopardizing … job creation in the energy sector and across our broader economy,” the senators wrote in the April 9 letter. The letter was also signed by GOP Sens. John Curtis of Utah, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Jerry Moran of Kansas.

In a win for House moderates and some Western lawmakers, the House bill strips language that would have allowed the sale of hundreds of thousands acres of public lands in Utah and Nevada. Opponents argued the sales would have opened the door for more oil and gas drilling.

What was gutted in the bill

The House bill takes an axe to tax credits for rooftop solar installments and eliminates electric vehicle tax credits after 2025, with a one-year exception for EVs manufactured by automakers that have sold fewer than 200,000 cars that qualified for the credit.

Credits for solar and electric vehicles, which reduce harmful emissions, help to boost demand for the technologies and drive down their cost.

House Republicans also tightened tax credit restrictions for projects associated with foreign entities, including China — an added blow to domestic clean energy expansion since China dominates much of the supply chain.

The bill slashes a three-year phase-down schedule previously proposed, and instead cuts off projects that don’t start construction within 60 days of the bill’s passage. Those projects would also have to start operating before 2029.

“This bill threatens the clean energy industry at a time when it’s proving to be not only economically beneficial — lowering costs, creating jobs and fueling local economies — but also essential to America’s energy future,” said Andrew Reagan, president of Clean Energy for America, an industry group.

The American Petroleum Institute, which represents the oil and gas industry, applauded the bill as a step to “restore American energy dominance.”

“By preserving competitive tax policies, opening lease sales” for oil and gas drilling and advancing permitting reforms, the legislation “is a win for our nation’s energy future,” API President Mike Sommers said in a statement.

No sale of public lands

At the behest of Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke and some other Republicans, lawmakers stripped a provision that would have sold or transferred about 460,000 acres of federal land in Nevada and Utah to local governments or private entities.

The proposal exposed sharp divisions between Western Republicans who say the federal government controls too much of their states and others such as Zinke, a former Interior secretary in Trump’s first term whose state is protective of access to lands for hunting and recreation.

“At the heart of the matter is that public land that’s in the federal estate belongs to everybody,” Zinke told The Associated Press on Thursday. “To suggest that you’re going to sell land to pay off the debt, I think that’s misguided and, quite frankly, disingenuous.”

The land sales had been inserted in the bill following a late-night committee vote, despite earlier pledges from Republican leaders that the sales were off the table.

Supporters said they would generate revenue and ease growth pressures by creating room for more and cheaper housing in booming Western cities such as Las Vegas, Reno, Nevada, and St. George, Utah. Those communities are hemmed in by federal property, which makes up 80 percent of the land in Nevada and 63 percent in Utah.

A spokesperson for Nevada Republican Rep. Mark Amodei, who sponsored the bid to sell federal lands in his state, said his office was “exploring all options” to make the transfers happen.

Housing advocates had cautioned federal land is not universally suitable for affordable housing, and some of the parcels to be sold were far from developed areas.

Tracy Stone-Manning, president of the Wilderness Society and a former director of the Bureau of Land Management under Biden, said she appreciated Zinke’s work to prevent the public lands sale.

But she said the bill was still a “big giveaway” to the private sector. “By opening hundreds of millions of acres to drilling, mining and logging to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy, this bill harms the tens of millions of people who like to hike, recreate or find solace in the outdoors,” she said.

Trump targets Biden’s climate policy

At the same time the bill slashes support for clean energy, it paves the way for oil, gas and coal.

Through the bill, natural gas pipeline developers can pay a $10 million fee for expedited permitting, and applicants for a potential liquefied natural gas export site can pay a $1 million fee to be deemed in the “public interest,” circumventing what is usually a regulatory challenge.

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A measure to ban fossil-fuel infrastructure in new low-rise residential buildings in Eugene will appear on the city’s November ballot.

The City Council held a special meeting Wednesday on a prospective referendum petition and took no action, referring the measure to voters.

In early February, the City Council passed an ordinance banning new fossil-fuel infrastructure in new low-rise residential construction. A referendum petition was submitted to the city recorder a few days later. On March 9, the petition signature sheets were submitted to the city recorder’s office to be validated.

The city recorder’s office received certification from Lane County Elections on March 15 that showed the petition contained the required 6,460 valid signatures to refer the measure to the ballot. An estimated 8,192 signatures were collected, according to Lane County Elections.

The next election date for Lane County is Nov. 7.

If approved, the measure would prohibit fossil-fuel infrastructure in new low-rise residential buildings. These are buildings that have not been used or occupied, with a height of no more than three stories above grade that include one or more dwelling units, and where occupants are primarily permanent residents – including but not limited to detached one- and two-family dwellings, townhouses, manufactured dwellings, and multifamily buildings.

Fossil-fuel infrastructure that would be prohibited by the measure includes natural gas piping, fuel oil piping and other fossil-fuel piping or conveyance systems within a building that connects a source of supply to a fossil-fuel-burning appliance. The measure would not prohibit fossil-fuel infrastructure in new mixed-occupancy buildings that include commercial use.

If approved, the measure’s prohibition on fossil-fuel infrastructure in new low-rise residential buildings would apply retroactively to building permit applications, including those necessary to install a new manufactured dwelling, submitted on or after June 30.

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By ANDREW SELSKY
Associated Press

SALEM, Ore. (AP) — The state of Oregon should divest from the fossil fuels industry to protect both the environment and its investments, three Oregon lawmakers said Wednesday as a new study put the level of that investment at almost $1.8 billion.

“The Oregon Treasury, which manages $130 billion of the state’s investment portfolio, is invested in oil, gas, and coal companies responsible for our climate emergency,” Reps. Khanh Pham, Paul Holvey and Jeff Golden said in a column published in The Oregonian/OregonLive, the state’s largest newspaper.

The three Democratic lawmakers announced that they will introduce a bill in the 2022 legislative session, which begins Feb. 1, “to disclose Oregon’s fossil fuel holdings so the public can clearly understand our state’s financial and climate risks.”

The burning of fossil fuels like coal and gas emits gases that are a leading cause of global warming and climate change. Oregon has been suffering the effects of climate change, with wildfires getting worse, a record-breaking heat wave last summer that killed more than 100 people, and a severe drought affecting much of the state.

Oregon State Treasurer Tobias Read, in an interview last summer with Oregon Public Radio, wouldn’t be pinned down on the amount of the state’s fossil fuel investments.

“It’s not just public equities, it’s also private equity, it’s also bonds,” said Read, a Democrat who’s running for governor in the 2022 election. “So we’re selling and buying bonds literally every day. So it changes.”

A group called the Climate Safe Pensions Network said in a report released Wednesday that the Oregon state employee pension fund’s investment in fossil fuels totals $1.77 billion, including investments with Exxon Mobile, Chevron Corp., ConocoPhillips and Marathon Petroleum.

The Climate Safe Pensions Network describes itself as a network of pension divestment and shareholder advocacy campaigns, coordinated and supported by .

“The fastest way for pensions to address climate change is to divest fossil fuel holdings and invest in just and equitable climate solutions,” said Amy Gray, Stand.earth’s senior climate finance strategist.

In their newspaper column, the three Oregon legislators challenged the state Treasury to “take a compelling first step toward bold climate leadership by disclosing the state’s fossil fuel holdings as soon as possible.”

“Accountability begins when we can follow the money,” they said.

The Treasury department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the newspaper column or the report.

But John Russell, the chairman of the Oregon Investment Council, said during a meeting Wednesday that divesting from fossil fuels and other questionable sectors goes beyond the council’s mandate.

“Divestiture is, basically, our body becoming an activist body, which I don’t think it was ever intended to be,” said Russell, whose council oversees the investment and allocation of all state of Oregon trust funds, including the Oregon Public Employees Retirement Fund.

However, Russell added that if the Legislature wants to change the statutes that the council operates under or advise the council, its members would be “open to that.”

He noted that before Wednesday’s meeting, the council’s staff received over 200 pages of public written comments and some 1,500 phone calls on the issue of divestment, though he said not all supported fossil fuel divestment.

Opponents of divestment argue that funds would lose whatever leverage they might have with the companies they’re involved with. Divestment advocates say that besides an effort to combat climate change, there’s also a financial incentive, with the value of share offerings in fossil fuel companies dropping.

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By PETER FAIRLEY
InvestigateWest

Can slicing a 100-mile trench into the bed of the Columbia River be good for the environment? The answer is a big yes, says a team of energy developers that proposes submerging power cables in the riverbed.

The developers say the cables could deliver “clean” energy that will be crucial for getting the most densely developed areas of Cascadia off fossil fuels.

A proposal by energy developer Sun2o Partners and transmission developer PowerBridge would insert the cables into the Columbia at The Dalles in Oregon. This electrical on-ramp is near the wind farms and solar farms installed along the Columbia Gorge in eastern Oregon and Washington.

The cables also would intersect the monster transmission lines at the Bonneville Power Administration’s Big Eddy substation, drawing cheaper solar power from the Southwest, steadier wind power from Montana and Wyoming, and reliable backup power from British Columbia’s supersized hydropower reservoirs.

But even climate-conscious developers can’t make plans involving a natural resource like the Columbia River without causing uneasiness among those concerned with ecosystems and communities. Along the Columbia, those affected would include tribal nations and unique cultural interests.

Sun2o and PowerBridge propose to bring their cables ashore in Portland, helping to electrify industries, buildings and vehicles while reducing the use of coal- and gas-fired power plants. Hence the project’s name: Cascade Renewable Transmission.

“The only places you can site solar and wind at scale are, for the most part, east of the Cascades. But the demand, the need for the electricity, is in Portland and Seattle, on the west side,” says Corey Kupersmith, the New York–based renewable energy developer who cofounded Sun2o and dreamed up the cable scheme. And power lines that link east and west are filling up fast, he says.

Anticipating environmental concerns, the developers assert they will do little harm to the Columbia, employing high-pressure pumps that make underwater cable installation quick and not so dirty. Water jets would shoot down from a “hydroplow” towed along the riverbed, stirring open an 18-inch-wide trench in the sediment.

Environmental impacts, they argue, would likely be short-term and outweighed by environmental gains: reductions in pollution from natural gas, petroleum fuels and coal. That includes emissions of carbon dioxide and methane, two greenhouse gases that are supercharging Cascadia’s wildfires and heat waves and disrupting even the Columbia’s temperature and timing.

To Elaine Harvey, however, the Cascade Renewable Transmission pitch sounds like one more industrial enterprise in a stream of projects that have harmed her people. Such ventures decimated the Columbia River’s fisheries and fenced off and degraded the shrub-steppe grasslands that the Yakama and other tribes and bands ceded in an 1855 treaty with the United States.

A member of the Yakama’s Kah-milt-pa, or Rock Creek, Band, Harvey lives with the legacy of dams, aluminum production, wind farms, expanding solar plants and other development. Each has infringed on her people’s right to pursue traditional practices.

As Harvey and Kah-milt-pa Chief Bronsco Jim Jr. wrote earlier this year in the newsletter of Columbia Riverkeeper: “Ours is a living culture, and we are being cheated by progress. An unrelenting cultural extinction in the name of energy development.”

Power-system experts say the grid that sufficed in the fossil-fuel era must increase capacity if renewable electricity is to become the lifeblood of economies.

Wind blows and sunlight shines most reliably in places that are sparsely populated — areas with weak power lines. Stronger grids, in contrast, enable more power to travel between regions, so those areas can help each other out — precisely what Texas couldn’t do when a deep freeze brought the state to its knees in February and when heat strained its grid last month.

To explore the role of power transmission and the tradeoffs involved in grid expansion, InvestigateWest spoke with Kupersmith, Harvey and Lauren Goldberg, the legal and program director for Columbia Riverkeeper.

Corey Kupersmith: Renewable energy developer

A passion for diving exposed Corey Kupersmith to coral bleaching resulting from water pollution and global warming. An engineer by training and a banker by trade, Kupersmith cofounded New York City–based Sun2o five years ago as a business venture that honors his environmental values

Pursuing solar energy projects in sun-soaked eastern Oregon and Washington inspired him to propose the Cascade link project. Sun2o found plenty of landowners and rural communities eager to host solar panels. But it struggled to secure affordable space on power lines so it could send that energy to the utilities in greatest need of renewable energy.

Moving power west over the Cascades means getting access to the Bonneville Power Administration’s (BPA) regional network, the U.S. Northwest’s transmission backbone. That network is maxing out as a wave of renewable power projects plug in. “BPA has like 28 gigawatts of solar, wind and storage requests,” says Kupersmith. “That’s going to be pushing systems to their limits.”

And that was before Oregon passed one of North America’s most aggressive grid decarbonization plans.

The bill, which Gov. Kate Brown signed on July 27, requires Oregon’s investor-owned utilities to deliver 80 percent carbon-free power by 2030, compared to less than 50 percent today. It mandates 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2040 — five years ahead of deadlines set by Washington state and California.

Bonneville itself is in a tough spot. The federal entity is being financially stretched by rising costs to maintain aging dams and improve impacted salmon fisheries and decreasing revenues as customers defect to cheaper suppliers.

Hitting a transmission barrier inspired Kupersmith to propose the Cascade cables. He knew putting them in the riverbed was an option, because PowerBridge had installed two transmission lines in the Hudson River to ease power bottlenecks in New York City. And he saw a submerged cable as an end-run around opposition to overhead lines that has scuppered previous grid expansion efforts in Cascadia and frequently ties up projects across the continent.

Kupersmith’s partner at PowerBridge, Chris Hocker, calls overhead lines “hideously problematic,” noting that they can take a decade or more to build. In contrast, he and Kupersmith anticipate their Columbia cables would begin pumping electricity in just five years — lightning speed for new transmission.

Of course, that depends on government and community approval. And the partners recently began conversations with the four tribes that have treaty rights in the region, including the Yakama Nation and the Cowlitz Indian Tribe. Kupersmith says they had hoped to meet earlier but were delayed by the pandemic and a desire to conduct consultations in person.

Elaine Harvey: Kah-milt-pa activist

For Elaine Harvey, a power line in the Columbia would add to a pile of damaging energy developments over the decades. One of the most devastating was the 1957 completion of The Dalles Dam — one of 14 major dams on the Columbia’s main stem — and decimation of the world’s largest fishery.

The Dalles Dam energized the associated Big Eddy substation, where Kupersmith and his partners hope to plug into BPA’s regional grid, and which has its own painful associations for local tribes.

The Dalles Dam’s 200-foot-high barrier submerged the storied Celilo Falls, where daring dip netters once caught leaping salmon and steelhead. The dam also submerged a complex of villages nearby, which had been a gathering point for traders from tribes across the Northwest. Prior to the dam, it was North America’s oldest site of continuous human habitation.

Those historic insults and other losses remain fresh more than half a century later, as Indigenous communities grapple with a settler culture that often seems incapable of hearing their concerns.

Harvey sees that inability manifested in another proposed grid reinforcement project that she’s fighting, just upstream from The Dalles. The Goldendale Energy Storage Project would build a pair of 60-acre reservoirs, one alongside the river and one on a bluff above. By moving Columbia River water between the reservoirs, the project would store and discharge energy like a giant battery.

The project faces vocal opposition from the Yakama Nation, to whom the site is profoundly sacred. Yakama stories recall the bluffs as a haven during great floods in millennia past, and Harvey says her band still forages there for culturally important “first foods,” such as desert parsley.

They already have lost much access to foraging sites because wind farms have fenced off large areas. Only one landowner hosting a wind farm allows Harvey’s people to enter and gather traditional plants, she says.

Harvey asks whether the onslaught of development in the Columbia Gorge is necessary. She questions whom the projects are intended to benefit, noting with suspicion the express line running between BPA’s Big Eddy hub and Los Angeles.

The express line and others were built in the 1960s to help power California. In the future, excess solar power could flow north when the sun is up. But today, the lines’ primary use remains the shipment of hydropower from the Columbia River dams and British Columbia south to California.

Harvey wants to know where development will stop. “What is this going to lead to? Is this going to lead to wind (turbines) down the middle of the river? What’s down the line?”

Climate change also worries Harvey. A biologist by training, she knows warmer water represents a growing threat to the Columbia’s struggling fisheries.

Harvey thinks other solutions need to be considered. Gas-fired power plants can be equipped to capture the CO2 they produce. Smarter logging practices and coastal protections can boost the ability of inland forests and kelp forests to capture atmospheric CO2. Rooftop solar panels can generate power where it’s needed most.

Bottom line, says Harvey: “We already gave up enough.”

Lauren Goldberg: River defender and lawyer

For Lauren Goldberg, projects like the Cascade cables present an acute challenge. Goldberg, a 15-year veteran at Columbia Riverkeeper, sees fossil fuels and climate change as existential threats to the river and the communities that rely on it. This is a reason Riverkeeper has been a mainstay in the “Thin Green Line” movement that has blocked many efforts to push more coal, oil and liquefied natural gas down the rail lines transiting the Gorge.

And it’s why it advocates for clean energy production. “The Columbia River is already being impacted by the climate crisis, and the projections are dire,” says Goldberg.

Goldberg says a lot of green energy development has happened in the Columbia Basin, and she expects that will continue. But that does not mean every project that calls itself renewable and green gets a pass?

And even if submerged power cables are deemed important for energy transition, for Goldberg their carbon-cutting potential must outweigh their direct environmental impacts.

“Whether it’s renewable energy or fossil energy, we need to understand how a project is going to impact people that rely on the Columbia for salmon and for clean water,” says Goldberg.

Goldberg stresses that burying 100-mile-long power cables in the riverbed is a concept that Riverkeeper has yet to grapple with. Based on experience and preliminary research, Goldberg identifies several issues. One is the impact from stirring up sediment. She says that while the Columbia is “incredibly beautiful,” it’s by no means “pristine.”

Another potential impact mentioned by Goldberg could come from the electromagnetic fields generated by power cables. Research commissioned by the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management looked at magnetic fields emanating from similar transmission cables laid across San Francisco Bay. Those cables helped reduce San Francisco’s dependence on gas-fired power plants.

The study found that the cables had some effects on migratory fish like salmon, which navigate partly by sensing Earth’s magnetic fields. For example, the cables increased the chance that salmon smolts would take a wrong turn that lengthened their journey to the ocean. But it detected no evidence that fish were harmed. Fish appeared to be just as successful at migrating through the bay after the cables were turned on.
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This report is part of Getting to Zero, InvestigateWest’s yearlong reporting initiative on reducing carbon in the Cascadia region. InvestigateWest’s work is supported in part by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

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The city of Portland will fight a legal decision that its 2016 ban on fossil fuel terminals is unconstitutional.

The Portland City Council on Wednesday voted to appeal a July decision of the Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA) to strike down the city’s ban, which attempted to create a new land use category for fossil fuel terminals and limit their proliferation in Portland.

Commissioner Dan Saltzman said cities must fight harder these days to protect the environment because there’s no leadership on climate change in the White House.

“This is an appeal that needs to be taken forward,” he said.

The council passed the policy in January 2016, after dozens of interested residents packed City Hall to testify in favor. Then four parties, including the Columbia Pacific Building Trades Council, appealed it to LUBA, which agreed that the city had unfairly affected interstate commerce by preventing petroleum from passing through city limits.

Willy Myers, executive director of the building trades council, is strongly against the city’s position. The law would hurt the entire state, he said in a note to the 91��Ƶ, because nearly all fossil fuels consumed in Oregon pass through Portland.

“Disallowing new infrastructure could create an energy bottleneck in meeting the needs of businesses and households across the state, lead to increased costs if supply is constrained and hamper economic growth,” he wrote.

Chief Deputy City Attorney Linly Rees said it’s unusual for the city to appeal a LUBA ruling, but in this case, the city attorney’s office believes there’s a reasonable basis for asking the Oregon Court of Appeals to reconsider. That’s partly because, in this case, two of three LUBA members recused themselves, leaving only one to issue the ruling.

At this point in Rees’ testimony to the City Council on Wednesday, Mayor Ted Wheeler cut in.

“I would like to add the hilarious footnote that that was referred to in the press as a ‘unanimous decision,’” he said, indicating air quotes. “They could have said ‘unilateral.’”

The council’s vote was unanimous, 5-0.

Commissioners were concerned the ruling could set a precedent impacting other ambitious policies intended to address climate change.

“It’s certainly possible that all three members of LUBA could get it wrong, from our point of view,” Commissioner Nick Fish said. “But I do think that what makes this case unique is that we’re talking about a fundamental constitutional question decided by a single member of LUBA which could in the future significantly limit our ability to move forward with climate-related legislation.”

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