Otherwise, Oregon and Washington will miss critical climate targets.

The Northwest seems finally poised to reap the fruits of years of hard work on climate change. Renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels, states and clean energy developers will soon enjoy a huge influx of federal climate dollars, and climate leaders sit at the helm of many state and local governments. But much like the proverbial kingdom that was lost for want of a nail, the Northwest states’ climate ambitions may suffer defeat over something utterly mundane: not enough high-voltage power lines.

That’s right. We may fail the climate test because we’re missing some wires.

A core strategy for decarbonizing the Northwest, as elsewhere, is to stop burning fossil fuels for electricity. Oregon and Washington both recently passed laws that require electric utilities to shift quickly away from coal and gas and toward solar and wind to generate power. Meeting these targets is a mammoth, and critical, undertaking. Today, the two biggest electric utilities in these states derive about half of their electricity from natural gas or coal and just ten percent from wind and solar.

But a major problem looms. Cascadia, like the United States as a whole, suffers from a woefully underbuilt and aging electric grid. The grid is so inadequate that hundreds of proposed wind and solar projects are ending up at the back of waitlists where they may sit for years—waitlists to connect to transmission. New transmission lines (the high-voltage lines that often stretch over mountain ranges and along rivers on tall, scaffolded towers) take a decade or more to construct, giving the problem increasing urgency with each passing year.

Unless Northwest policymakers develop a plan for building out the grid we need, and unless they start erecting it immediately—through the Bonneville Power Agency, state action, utility investment, or some combination of these means—the region’s ambitious decarbonization commitments will amount to so much hot air.

EASTSIDE SOLAR AND WIND NEED TRANSMISSION TO REACH WESTSIDE HOMES AND BUSINESSES

In Cascadia, the best sunlight and wind for making power are east of the Cascade mountains. Renewable projects in the region are exploding, with more than 100 wind and solar projects underway in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. Backers have proposed dozens more, including more than 40 solar farms in Washington alone, which today houses just two.

Washington and Oregon, and the electric utilities within them, are counting on tapping this eastside wind and solar to power the homes and businesses on the westside that consume most of the states’ energy. Washington’s state energy strategy, in the scenario that costs the least and electrifies the most, relies on wind from Wyoming and Montana to provide 36 percent of Washington’s clean electricity by 2050. Today, Washington derives just over 5 percent of its total electricity generation from wind power from any state. Similarly, almost all of the utility-scale wind and solar resources that Puget Sound Energy (PSE), Washington’s largest electric utility, modeled in its official, required 2021 integrated resource plan (IRP), are east of the Cascades.

But to access this high-quality wind and sun, westside utilities like PSE in Washington and Portland General Electric (PGE) in Oregon will need to reach far outside their service territories, something they don’t need to do today because their current generating facilities, which are mostly powered by natural gas or hydroelectricity, are nearby. The power lines that PSE and PGE own run from generating facilities, many of which utilities will need to retire if they are powered by fossil fuels, to the cities and towns they serve on the westside. The utilities’ transmission lines barely touch the inland Northwest, with its vast wind and solar offerings.

THE NORTHWEST GRID IS ALREADY JAMMED

To bring far-away wind and solar power to their customers, PSE, PGE, and other utilities d...