Why we're using more electricity these days — and paying more for it - The Seattle Times

Why we’re using more electricity these days - and paying more for it | The Seattle Times

IT WAS A tough year for hydroelectricity. And next year will be a little tougher for your electric bill.

In 2023, drought conditions sent Seattle City Light — which uses 80% to 90% hydro in its power-generation mix — onto the open energy market to buy power from other sources during peak surges in customer demand. (Remember those summer weeks when you were cranking the fans?) That ate into SCL’s reserves, triggering an automatic, legally required surcharge(4%) to beef them back up.

That surcharge lands on top of a 4.5% rate increase Seattle City Council approved this fall, plus a 1% increase in power costs from the federal Bonneville Power Administration (we have longstanding contracts to buy their hydro). All this, SCL anticipates, will mean a roughly $9/month increase for “a typical residential customer” (using 630 kilowatt-hours each month), or $18 per billing cycle.

SCL also says it has one main takeaway from its hydro-drought experience: continue to diversify its renewable-energy portfolio.

This March, we published a story about some complex-sounding (but important!) changes SCL and other regional utilities were adopting to further decarbonize our electrical grid and insulate themselves a little more from erratic weather — which not only messes with renewable-energy resources, but makes consumer demand spikier. (Seattle is using more air conditioners, for example. If we’re in a heat wave, and we’re in a drought, and everybody cranks the AC at the same time, that’s a strain on the system.)

Among other things, the changes would allow us to lean more heavily on our and others’ renewables (hydro, solar, wind) instead of having to scramble quite so madly on the market to buy potentially expensive, and/or potentially dirty, fuel (coal, natural gas).

One of those programs, the Western Resource Adequacy Program(WRAP, in which utilities budget power to share with each other in times of scarcity), continues to move forward as it sorts out logistical details. The city council approved SCL’s participation in spring 2023, and the utility expects to be a full participant in WRAP’s binding agreement by summer 2028.

Other investments are in the works: SCL is negotiating power-purchase deals with a shortlist of electricty-makers it has identified over the past year. A few months ago, for example, SCL signed a five-year purchase agreement with a 50-megawatt wind site in northern Oregon run by private company ALLETE. (We’re a publicly owned utility; they’re an investor-owned utility.)

To be clear, ALLETE is still in the coal business— its corporate child BNI Energy has a lignite mine in North Dakota — but it’s been moving into renewables, including the construction of wind farms across the country, and is exploring adding solar and energy storage to the Oregon location. (Energy storage is another huge decarbonization question. Coal is stored energy — which is what makes it so awesome and hard to quit. But the wind blows and the river flows only when they feel like it.)

No matter the weather, SCL says it needs to keep moving forward. Western Washington residents are buying lots of power-hungry electric vehicles. Mayor Bruce Harrell has been pushing Building Emissions Performance Standards (BEPS, a policy to reduce emissions in the heating and cooling of large buildings), which he’s sent to city council. The “electrify everything” ethos, from transportation to your stovetop, further will increase demand across the region.

How will SCL and its fellow utilities keep dancing on this shifting ground? It’s an ongoing story.