NW Clean Energy Vision

A clean and affordable energy future for the Northwest begins with reliable electricity services, ample enough to satisfy our basic human needs, improve our quality of life, protect the environment and create a vital local and regional economy. By concentrating on the long term rather than gambling on the short term, we can meet the region’s growing demand for electricity without mortgaging our grandchildren’s future, driving wild salmon to extinction or increasing global warming.

A clean and affordable energy future is no “feel-good” dream – it is both necessary and attainable. With our high-tech industry, nascent solar, wind and efficiency industries, and skilled workforce, the Northwest can become a world leader in clean energy technologies. But we must build our energy policy on the foundations of long-term economic health and environmental stewardship. That means reducing our reliance on hydropower and fossil fuels, expanding our clean energy industry, and making our buildings, appliances and industrial facilities more energy efficient.  It means growing our clean energy industries and the numbers of family-wage jobs those industries provide, and it means furthering efforts by utilities and the Bonneville Power Administration to deliver clean and affordable energy services, and encouraging consumers and businesses to invest in clean energy.

So how do we make it happen? Clean energy faces real and formidable barriers, including financial market structure, consumer and business decision horizons, tax breaks and subsidies for fossil fuel and nuclear energy, limited valuation of environmental costs, regulatory structures which tilt against clean energy, lack of understanding of new technologies, and politics.

Another challenge is the Northwest’s complex electric utility structure. The area has a high percentage of locally controlled public utilities, along with a significant federal presence: the Bonneville Power Administration provides about 40 percent of the region’s power and controls over 70 percent of the transmission system.

The Citizens Energy Plan articulates practical, affordable steps that surmount these barriers and deliver the vision. By presenting the policies and actions needed to deliver energy efficiency and clean renewable energy, the Plan empowers citizens to push for a clean and affordable energy future.