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Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

We ship all this renewable power to LA, and yet more than half my local (Portland) power makeup is coal.

Oh come one, that's small box thinking, you gotta look at the big picture. LA has a larger electricity demand than portland and it oscillates in a different pattern than portland. In the summer, due to AC, LA needs more peak capacity. However in the winter, the equation flips and now Portland needs that capacity to heat homes. Keeping all that hydro in washington to support the comparitively teensy population of 650k in portland is a waste, especially when demand is needed down south and not in the north and vice versa; this line serves 3 million in LA and represents half the LADWP peak capacity. I'd argue cutting LA off would force more coal plants to open than what is needed to electrify portland today.

Fantastic and valid points, though I think pkulak also has a fair point in identifying that this big picture setup negatively impacts folks in Portland via air pollution and other side effects of more coal plants than would otherwise be required.

On the other hand, that energy has to come from some place and this set up negatively impacts someone no matter where the coal plant is located. Maybe the coal comes from the cascades and it makes more sense to put the plant close to the source, rather than somewhere near LA and have to freight in the coal from the mines and deal with those externalities that might be worse than simply running a wire to LA.

You misunderstood me a bit, though I was pretty vague. I was just remarking on how we have enough local, renewable power locally, and yet burn coal. We could easily get our power from hydro AND send the majority to LA, but instead we don't. Probably because LA is willing to pay so much more for it.

I don't know the political climate in Oregon about hydro, but it's starting to turn a bit in Washington. Dams are pretty awful for salmon and so much of our ecology is salmon-based as well as the culture/livelihoods of Native Americans.

The biggest story in recent years was the Elwha dam removal. It's stunning to see how much the landscape has changed since: https://therevelator.org/elwha-dam-removal/

And a recent story about a Skagit river dam: https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/seattles-s...

I don't think anyone's seriously proposing getting rid of any of the major electricity producing dams though, just the minor old ones that are doing nothing of significance.

In raw economics terms, the price LA pays is lower than the cost of them opening their own coal plants, otherwise they would do just that. Therefore, it is for some reason cheaper to open a coal plant near portland (maybe closer to the coal source) and run a wire down to LA, than it is to come up with some other source of peak demand electricity for those 3 million people in LA who rely on this capacity. A private market does what is profitable, ultimately.

Maybe if we had public utilities, however, we would actually invest in 'unprofitable' nuclear energy and save our planet in the process, since we wouldn't be beholden to making shareholders a profit.

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