Poor Democratic Governance

Another reason why I reject the current liberal world of “let’s all just be the big tent and talk about the insane orange man and focus on the next election” is that it completely ignores the longer term power issues that must be fixed if Democrats are going to hold power long enough to flush this generation of Republicans down the toilet. In short, if you get elected and you don’t have ideas or a program and have just ignored all the structural issues that led to Trump, you end up with Keir Starmer and the likelihood that your hold on power will be deservedly brief.

And let’s be clear, there’s plenty wrong with Democratic governance. We didn’t get to Trumpism without Democrats having some responsibility for it. Some of that is that a lot of Democratic governance simply isn’t very good. One great example is housing policy, one that means a lot to readers of this blog. Another is related homelessness crisis, an enormous failure in governance and social policy. A third is the lack of economic answers to struggling communities, or really even interest in finding those answers. There are so many. Now is the time to hash these out. We can’t control the far right, but we can control doing better with what power we do have. The worthless Chuck Schumer certainly doesn’t understand that, but we can.

Well, ProPublica has gone on one of its classic deep dives into another example, which is why Oregon and Washington, despite having abundant win, are actually almost last and in fact dead last for the latter in the nation in getting wind on the power grid, despite both being deep blue states. The answer is a combination on relying on a sclerotic federal power agency, in the Bonneville Power Authority, and indifference at the state legislative level for decades to regulating the region’s infrastructure.

On Feb. 17, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek released a video assuring Oregonians that Donald Trump would not derail the progressive state’s efforts to combat climate change.

As promised during his presidential campaign, Trump had issued executive orders during his first week in office aimed at halting new sources of wind power and freezing Biden-era funding for renewable energy.

Oregon, Kotek said, had been “leading the way for years on courageous state policies to fight climate change.” Along with neighboring Washington state, Oregon has set an ambitious mandate for electric utilities to be carbon neutral within the next two decades.

“It’s going to take all of us working together finding innovative solutions, no matter the obstacles, to confront the climate crisis,” the governor said, “and we are not turning back.”

But the reality is not nearly as inspiring as Kotek made it sound. For all their progressive claims, Oregon and Washington trail nearly all other states in adding new sources of renewable energy. Iowa, a Republican-led state with roughly the same population and usable volume of wind as Oregon, has built enough wind farms to generate three times as much wind power.

What’s held the Northwest back is a bottleneck Oregon and Washington leaders paid little attention to when they set out to go 100% green, an investigation by ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting found: The region lacks the wiring to deliver new sources of renewable energy to people’s homes, and little has been done to change that.

Northwest leaders left it to a federal agency known as the Bonneville Power Administration to arrange badly needed upgrades to an electrical grid that’s nearly a century old in places.

Bonneville, under a setup that is unique to the Northwest, owns most of the power lines needed to carry green power from the region’s sunny and windy high desert to its major population centers. Bonneville has no state or local representation within its federally appointed bureaucracy and, by statute, operates as a self-funded business.

The agency decides which energy projects can hook up based on whether its infrastructure can handle the extra load, and it decides how quickly that infrastructure gets expanded. Its glacial pace has delayed wind and solar projects under Democratic and Republican presidents alike.

Of the 469 large renewable projects that applied to connect to Bonneville’s grid since 2015, only one has reached approval. Those are longer odds than in any other region of the country, the news organizations found. No major grid operator is as stingy as Bonneville in its approach to financing new transmission lines and substations needed to grow the power supply, according to industry groups that represent power producers.

Efforts to bypass Bonneville didn’t start until this year, when Oregon and Washington legislators considered bills to create their own state bonding authorities for upgrading the region’s high-voltage network.

Both bills died.

The grid’s severe constraints are hindering the Northwest at a time when it desperately needs more electricity. Oregon and Washington lawmakers lured power-guzzling data centers with tax breaks in recent years, and the industry has helped drive electricity demand sky high.

Having failed to add enough green-energy sources or any new gas-fired power, the Northwest buys electricity from elsewhere, at high prices, during extreme weather. Rates paid by customers of major Oregon utilities are now 50% higher than five years ago. The worsening energy shortage threatens millions of residents with continual rate hikes and sporadic power outages — not to mention dashing the Northwest’s hopes of drastically reducing its contribution to climate change.

Now, the BPA has been a shitshow for a long time. I’ve been working on my never-ending book on the history of the Northwest since 1960 and one of the things I’ve been writing about his how the BPA created huge problems with questionable decisions about nuclear production in the 70s that backfired big time. So the details are a little more complicated than for other states. But these blue states have also completely dropped the ball, which is going to mean higher energy costs around the Northwest. Tina Kotek can say what she wants, but where’s the leadership on getting bills through the legislature. It’s not like Democrats don’t have the majority!

This is the kind of thing I’m talking about when I talk of the need to focus on things other than Trump. The thing about Democratic governance is that it needs to be the best governance. If it’s not, then it just feeds into right-wing talking points about blue states. Whether an issue like this would be critical in an electoral cycle probably depends on overall energy costs, but it certainly could. In any case, what’s the point of holding power if you aren’t competent enough to move policy forward?

Also, Rhode Island may be a mess in many ways, but we are 4th in growth of green energy production and that is thanks to competent governance in the state on this issue that brought a lot of stakeholders together, including organized labor, to get the infrastructure funded and built. There’s no excuse for Washington and Oregon to be this bad.