Workers want a ‘green’ aluminum plant. Now they just need clean power.

FERNDALE, Wash. — Ryan Chapman was on pace to make $148,000 as a roving maintenance worker when he learned two years ago that Alcoa was shutting down the aluminum plant. Soon he was collecting unemployment and pursuing a bachelor’s degree in his late 30s, with two young sons and a stay-at-home wife. It was, he said, “a drastic change in quality of life.”

But unlike so many places gutted by American industrial decline, Chapman and hundreds of other laid-off employees of the Alcoa Intalco Works aluminum smelter are tantalizingly close to recapturing that past.

A plan to revamp this factory as a key piece in the future of renewable energy in the United States has been embraced by seemingly everyone: the machinists union, a private equity firm, the new electric vehicle industry, environmental groups and the state’s political establishment — from Washington’s pro-environment governor, Jay Inslee (D), to pro-jobs local Republicans. And it would make the smelter the only one functioning west of the Mississippi.But a final obstacle — how to power the factory, and who will pay for that — may yet scuttle the deal.

The dominant Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency which manages the Pacific Northwest’s huge dams and sprawling transmission lines, is balking, saying it simply doesn’t have enough dependable, low-cost hydropower to promise the Intalco plant, which is set amid forests and pastureland on the shores of the Puget Sound. And its position is backed by local electrical utilities who cherish their dependable power supplies from Bonneville — and their low rates.