Dramatic increases in the number of data centers, electric vehicles and electric appliances around the Pacific Northwest will cause demand for electricity in the region to potentially double over the next two decades.
That’s according to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council. On Tuesday, the congressionally mandated regional power planning agency presented its latest 20-year demand forecast for the Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana power system.
The stark projections do not include potential reductions in demand the council said will come from expected increases in energy efficiency and planned demand-response programs to shift power use to off-peak hours.
The forecast comes at a time when the region’s energy future is in flux.
The scale of that growth between 2027 and 2046, however, varies substantially from one modeled scenario to another.
In 2024, the region’s demand load was about 22,000 average megawatts. (Average megawatt is a unit of measurement for power — one annual aMW is equivalent to 1 megawatt produced continuously for one year.) Peak demand was about 35,000 megawatts in the winter and 33,000 megawatts in the summer.
Energy efficiency measures currently save the region an estimated 5,000 aMW, or a little less than one-fourth of total average demand, the presentation showed.
But peak demand is projected to grow as much as 3 percent each year. That could nearly double current highs by 2046 if the Northwest sees rapid economic growth and more climate warming.
Even with a recession stagnating demand for power, peak demand would still grow about 40 percent, council models show.
Average energy demand will follow similar patterns, projections show.
New model, new world
The council arrived at those projections by building its most complex computer model yet, Simmons said.
It took an “end use” approach that sums up individual forecasts for nearly every imaginable thing that uses power down to the smallest level and then adds that all up. This year, the council also employed an “econometric model” that looks at statistical relationships between economic quantities and weather to past demand.
In practice, all that boils down to models that can provide a look into potential futures — even in small geographic areas during specific hours on any given day.
Those models show a future where the region sees record demand on hot summer afternoons and cold winter mornings.
In addition, in the next five years, electricity demand from data centers will grow exponentially — even under the lowest projected outcomes. On the low end, demand will go from a couple hundred aMW to nearly 1,500. On the high end, utilities expect it will explode to about 4,600.
And even if the region can meet that challenge — which it must to keep lights on — then power demand from car and home electrification (as gas-powered appliances are replaced), as well as hydrogen production, all quickly start to take off around 2030.
Spurred by Washington and Oregon laws requiring most cars sold by 2035 to be electric vehicles, EV charging will go from using almost no power this year to sucking up between 5,500 aMW and 6,500 aMW in 2046.
Hydrogen production is also projected to grow to between 1,000 aMW to 3,000 aMW over the same time period.
The Bonneville Power Administration has identified some of the same trends.
“We also see forecast uncertainty broadening,” BPA spokesman Doug Johnson said.
BPA markets power produced by the federal Columbia-Snake River hydropower system and funds the council. The federal agency noted in its 2024 Resource Program that the previous decade’s steady annual growth of 0.3 percent has skyrocketed to 2.2 percent.
The Pacific Northwest Utilities Conference Committee released its own projections, largely mirroring the council’s. It emphasized surging demand highlights the need for more generation and transmission infrastructure. But those projects often face fierce opposition for harms they stand to cause.
All that adds up to a dangerous sum to Kurt Miller, who is CEO of Northwest Public Power Association and not part of the council.
“The latest forecasts make one thing clear: We’re demanding more from the electric grid than it’s currently built to deliver,” he said.
Southwest Washington impacts
Erica Erland, communications director for Clark Public Utilities, said the utility has “been consistently cautioning our local, state and regional leaders that there are very real and immediate concerns about regional resource adequacy, specifically during extreme weather events.”
Erland pointed to the January 2024 storm as well as recent summer heat domes “that pushed the regional power system very close to its limit and required swift regional coordination to keep the lights on.”
Cowlitz Public Utility District did not respond to a request for comment on how the scenarios in the new projections might impact operations and power rates.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Jennifer Light, the council’s director of power planning, said the council’s increasingly sophisticated models will help the region build a strategy to handle growing uncertainty.
“We’ll have some insights that will allow us to understand what you might build for those really high risk futures,” she said. “We think we’ll have the information to build a robust strategy that can be adaptive.”
