By Jennifer Langston

Oregon has been having a robust debate over the appropriate date for closing the state’s lone coal power plant.
The Boardman plant could theoretically operate until 2040, but its
owners have proposed an earlier closure to avoid investing in expensive
pollution controls.

There’s been a lot of discussion about whether the plant should close in 2015 or 2020 (and how much its owners must spend
in the meantime.) But that disagreement has become so central to the
discussion that it’s overshadowed what may be a much more important
question: What happens after the coal plant closes?

Will Portland General Electric adopt another outdated fossil fuel
strategy, building natural gas plants that will continue to release
greenhouse gas emissions for decades to come? Or will the utility think
creatively to pursue low-carbon options that reduce demand in the first
place and then fill it with clean wind, solar or geothermal energy? If
your chief concern is addressing Oregon’s largest single source of
greenhouse gas emissions, the replacement strategy matters. While
burning natural gas is less polluting than coal, that process can
release roughly half the carbon emissions. And if a utility invests millions of dollars to build a new gas plant, they’ll want to run it for a long time.

Here’s some rough math to illustrate the point that long-term thinking
should matter most.

• On
  average, Boardman releases roughly 4 million tons of CO2 each year.
  If the coal plant keeps running from 2015 to 2040, it would release 100 million tons of CO2 during that time period.
• If you close the coal plant in 2015 and replace its power with a new natural gas
  plant that releases about half the pollution, you’d emit 50 million tons of CO2 over that same period. Sounds better!
• But say you keep the coal plant running until 2020, at which
  point you replace the coal power with completely clean energy sources. In that
  scenario you’d emit just 20 million tons of CO2 over the period from 2015 to 2040. 

I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t try to move our region off of
the dirtiest, most polluting power source as soon as possible. But I am
suggesting that it’s equally – if not more – important to focus on what
happens next. Saving 30 million tons of CO2  – the potential difference
between replacing Boardman with a gas plant or clean renewables – would
be like taking every car in the state of Oregon off the road. And leaving them parked for two years.

I bring this up now because a compromise agreement reached last week
between Portland General Electric and a consortium of ratepayer and
environmental advocates finally begins to address the replacement
question. (Here’s coverage of the deal in The Oregonian and the Portland Tribune.)