Any Good News on the Green Energy Front?
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With Donald Trump attempting to kill anything that looks like green energy in America, part of his nostalgic politics of the 1950s, when Men Were Men and American Cars Got 8 Miles to the Gallon Like It Should Be, it’s hard to see much good news on the green energy front. But in Oregon, there is some and ProPublica explored it:
Kotek, a Democrat, has now issued two executive orders mandating that state agencies speed up renewable energy development by any available means, including fast-tracking permits and directly paying for new transmission lines.
Those efforts could eventually be backed up by money. The state’s energy department, in a first, recommended lawmakers consider creating a state entity to finance, plan and build transmission lines. A lawmaker whose bill to create such an authority failed this year suddenly has hope for getting it done, and he said the governor’s office is working with him to make it happen.
What was essentially an unacknowledged problem among many Oregon policymakers now has the full attention of the governor and the key agencies that report to her. There has been new attention on electrical transmission in Washington state, as well.
The shift comes as President Donald Trump has created new obstacles to ramping up renewable energy. This year, he removed tax credits that made wind and solar cheaper to build, blocked new wind permits and fired employees of the federal agency that reviews them.
This was the year “where you’ve seen all these factors coming together — we know that our outdated grid is choking our ability to grow across the state, and we’re already paying more for electricity,” Kotek said in an interview last week.
Kotek acknowledged the role of OPB and ProPublica’s reporting when asked what prompted the changes.
“You’ve been doing some great stories,” she said.
In May, OPB and ProPublica showed that the state ranked 47th in renewable energy growth over the past decade. Washington is 50th.
OK, the story is kind of self-serving. But still, if journalism can actually get politicians to do something positive, well, isn’t that what we want in the world?