[Intro Music] We live on a planet which has greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

We are grateful to those greenhouse gases because they keep the temperature of the planet at a level which supports life as we know it.

Extracting, processing, and combusting fossil fuels is increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

And what this does is simply increase the capacity of our atmosphere to retain heat.

Yes.

So when we look at sustainability in terms of energy, we can see finite resources such as coal, such as oil that we're using up, and these resources are depleting.

But it's not just about the fact that they're not gonna be there forever.

It's also that these resources tend to have health and well-being impacts, causing climate change as well as local pollution.

It's gonna have to be a transition to renewable energy, solar power, wind power.

We have tremendous potential in the state and are producing solar, we're producing wind.

About half of our electricity is actually hydro.

We're looking at renewable hydrogen, our geothermal options, and we're looking at offshore wind.

It's far more sustainable and a better choice for all.

The planet will go on without us, so it's up to us to decide what role we want to have on this planet.

Energy Horizons is made possible in part by the Elizabeth Maughan Charitable Foundation, The Four Way Community Foundation, and by the Members of Southern Oregon PBS.

Thank you.

Energy can be harnessed in many ways.

Traditional electric generators are usually powered by fossil fuels, which brought human civilization to the level of prosperity we've grown accustomed to in the twenty first century.

But fossil fuels pollute our environment and won't be available in today's quantity forever.

This is what's driving interest in renewable energy.

Solar, wind, wave, geothermal, and more.

We're building more solar plants in the desert and planning to build massive wind turbines off the coast.

These projects are, in many ways, promising.

They represent a new direction for energy generation.

But there are those who see these shiny futuristic looking installations and think, this can't be right.

There's no way it's this simple.

Those people are correct.

On its own, building more renewable energy systems will not bring us the sustainable, prosperous future we yearn for.

For renewable energy to do any good, we need to move that energy around and store excess energy for cloudy, windless days.

Our team is traveling around the state of Oregon, a land as geographically diverse as any other, to understand the immense challenges involved with upgrading the transmission grid to handle the adoption of renewable energy.

This topic is a hurdle and a major limiting factor to the energy transition.

A lot of people know about renewable energy, and they know that we're adopting renewable energy, and they might even know about different methods of generating energy renewably.

But I think a lot of people don't know about some of the challenges with transmission.

They don't understand all the details there.

Yeah.

I think that's always the challenge for us as researchers, and this is we're talking about a transformational change here.

So trust me, it's easy to get lost in the complexity.

Mother Nature delivered a one-two punch with snow and fierce winds.

Powerful gust helped bring down branches and huge trees.

It crashed onto three cars and knocked down power lines.

We had a pretty rough ice storm here in Portland couple weeks ago.

I can't tell you how many generators I heard running, in my neighborhood when we lost power for 6 days.

Crews are working to restore electricity, but with this many outages and in these conditions, it may take some time to get the lights back on.

Maybe that's front of mind for folks to think about a portable generator to power your fridge or something during an outage.

Imagine if you didn't have the extension cord that plugged that in.

So you wanted to power your fridge, but you didn't have the extension cord.

That's what transmission is.

Right?

And I think people understand that pretty clearly.

So the challenge is we have many generators.

Yeah.

And the generators are very large.

The transmission system is huge.

There's 360,000 miles of transmission lines in the United States and 44,000 miles in the northwest.

There's a bunch of players in this.

It's the biggest industry in the world.

There's providers and utilities, PGE, Pacific Corp, BPA, EWeb, Northwest Natural.

They're the utilities.

They get the policymakers like the Oregon legislature, Governor Kotek.

And then the regulators, the state level, it's the Oregon Public Utilities Commission or the PUC and the Energy Facility Siting Council.

And then at the federal level, there's the alphabet soup of FERC, NERC.

EPA is involved in that.

And then there's this whole group of planners like the Northwest Power Planning Council.

And then there's all the people that actually the doers, the marketers of energy at the wholesale level, fuel resellers, and solar installers.

And then there's all the stakeholders that have a stake in all this and wanna see it go one way or another, environmental groups, the industry lobbyists.

And then finally, there's the rate payers, which is all of us.

We're the ones who end up paying the bill.

And so anybody that uses energy, which is everybody, is a rate payer.

PacifiCorp is a regional utility that serves about 2 million customers in 6 western states.

We own a vertically integrated generation transmission distribution network.

That means we own much of the power that we use to generate electricity for our customers.

We own the transmission system, and we own the distribution system.

Utilities are what we call a natural monopoly, and that developed at the turn of the last century.

It didn't make sense to have a whole bunch of small companies serving the same function because you ended up with multiple power lines down the street.

That didn't make sense.

As the industry developed, natural monopoly areas made sense in terms of lower costs and higher reliability.

The standard that we're held to in our role as an essential public service is safe, reliable electric service at a fair and reasonable cost.

There are some essential public services in modern life that make civilized life possible.

Sanitary sewer, clean drinking water, electric service, those are the big three.

We take our role as an essential public service very seriously.

The electrical system is just incredible.

It's the most complex operating machine in the world.

So many moving parts, so many different things that have to be coordinated and brought to deliver you electricity at the quality that you expect.

If we plug in any of our devices, if we plug in our fridge and we don't get the 120 volt and 60 hertz signal that that thing's made for, it doesn't work well.

And you can break equipment that way.

The power quality is critical.

The appliances we use and the loads we use to power the life that we enjoy, it all depends on a very specific, range of frequency and voltage at the point of use.

So you've got the resource with the generation next to it, and then you create the electricity, it goes through the transmission system.

It hits a substation, and then it gets dropped down in voltage to, the local distribution system, and then it gets dropped down again and gets to your house.

The reason they use the big transmission system is because it's very efficient and there's very little losses.

And then stepping it down creates losses, and overall, it's like a 6 percent loss before it even gets to your house.

But you have to keep stepping it down 500,000 volts to 21,000 or 13,000 volts, and then 120 in your house.

The electricity grid is as fundamental to modern life as it is complicated.

But the system is now growing even more complex with the addition of new carbon neutral energy generators like solar and wind.

We have installed 5,600 megawatts of renewable energy systems on our network, And that's against an overall network capacity of around 14,000 megawatts.

So it's become a significant energy resource.

When customer demand warrants, it's time to go build a new power resource somewhere.

And it's usually in a remote area.

It's not often in urban centers where people live.

Transmission becomes very important.

You locate whatever the resource is, construct that, expand your transmission system to gather that energy, and move it onto the larger transmission system, and get that power to where people live.

Expansion of the transmission system is now an important consideration, both for reliability and for wholesale trading of electricity.

There is no decarbonization without reliability.

It simply won't happen.

We lost power for 6 days.

I mean, you know, without power, we we go back a few decades, you know, more than that, a few centuries, and you really feel it.

So you've heard of brownouts or blackouts.

I mean, that happens when the grid becomes unstable and the frequencies dip too much or they climb too high.

Now historically, rotating machines, so think of like a combustion turbine or a rotating engine, you have an inertia in the rotating machinery of that.

So if there is some sort of hiccup on the grid, there's kind of an implicit ride through, through that rotating mass.

And when you have a bunch of them, there's a lot of inertia.

That's a challenge as we go away from those types of generators and we go towards things like solar panels.

There's no rotating mass there.

Renewables tend to be what are called intermittent.

When you run a gas plant or coal plant, it just runs flat and it's called baseload.

It's just a big block of power.

Right?

And wind and solar, wind kind of goes with the wind, and solar, only operates when the sun's up.

It's intermittent.

And so what do you do when it's not operating?

And that's where energy storage and batteries come into play.

That's becoming a bigger and bigger part of integrating the intermittent renewables with the energy storage batteries so you can get that base load power and provide as much power and as much as we need.

That combination of the renewables with the energy storage batteries is gonna be extremely powerful and gonna be incredibly important for us to meet our greenhouse gas emission goals.

Energy storage systems, both chemical batteries, hydroelectric pump storage, and other technologies are going to be increasingly important as this transition continues.

Storage is the hot item for the next few years.

You know, here in Oregon, we can produce as much renewable energy as we want, but we run into the issues of transmission and of storage, being able to both get that energy to the people who need it and then being able to get it to them at the time of day when they need it.

Batteries are just accelerating in terms of how good they are, how long they last, and declining in cost.

Our solar panels can trickle feed during the day when we're not there, and then we'll use that battery power to do our computers and our TVs and our heating systems during the night.

I'm super hopeful about that as in terms of, where the future's headed.

Modern batteries use a variety of special materials, like cobalt and lithium.

Lithium ion batteries have become prevalent in multiple areas of modern life.

Cell phones, laptops, cameras, and more.

They're critical for electric vehicles, which are advertised as a great step towards energy sustainability.

The use of electric vehicles is more efficient in terms of carbon emissions than traditional gas powered vehicles, depending slightly on the way their recharge energy is sourced.

But the rapid adoption of EVs is shifting emissions upstream in our supply chain.

Lithium mining is emerging as a major upstart industry in the United States.

The Thacker Pass mine project just south of the Oregon Nevada border is being developed in the McDermitt Caldera, home to one of the largest lithium deposits on Earth.

This is presented as one of the most important investments for America's clean energy future.

But some local people, predominantly members of the McDermitt Tribe through an independent activist group called People of Red Mountain are raising red flags over how the mining of lithium near their community will impact the local environment.

This is a huge deposit of lithium.

There's actually large deposits of lithium all throughout the McDermitt Caldera.

It's a very hot commodity at the moment with this huge push for a transition to electric vehicles.

There's a lot of abandoned mine sites that are in Nevada where there's pit leaks, you know, water that cannot be used again.

And this is water that is contaminated with chemicals from these mines that are seeped into the water table.

Any mining that are heavily dependent on water, is gonna dry out the, earth faster.

It's gonna bring destruction to to the people.

The way that cars are now, you know, with gasoline and, you know, things like that, the emissions are under the hood, and they come out through your tailpipe.

At the time you're driving, your your EV car is not burning CO2 while it pre burned it with all this mining system.

I mean, we're talking about this, like, footprint, this carbon footprint.

It's massive for these mines.

Basically, there is a spotlight on the caldera.

We know that.

They're looking for the minerals, and they're gonna say that they can mine their way out of climate change, but we just know that it's a finite resource and you can't do that.

Right?

The potential environmental issues surrounding lithium in EV batteries also apply to batteries for energy storage on the transmission grid.

Anytime we need to dig up materials to build new infrastructure, it implies a significant release of greenhouse gas.

Additionally, these batteries don't last forever, raising the important question of how we should dispose of or recycle batteries once they're used up.

There is controversy around it.

We have to use resources to make this renewable energy, and we might get immediate environmental degradation.

But we have to think, are we making the right choices for the long term future and the infrastructure that we're trying to do?

We're trying to rewire America, essentially.

We're trying to change and be more sustainable.

I think we can look at the methods we're doing it, the extent that we do it, and then of course a waste management infrastructure or a recycling infrastructure for the batteries themselves.

We haven't set that up.

So what one of my fears is we're just gonna go gung ho into the lithium without having a system where maybe we could actually mine less lithium.

That happens with material management and waste management in everything we do now.

I mean, you can compare it to household items like plastics and food packaging.

We're just now starting to figure out how do you recycle all this stuff.

I have confidence we'll be able to figure that part out.

It'll add cost to it, but I think the world needs to go that way.

Fortunately, the technology of batteries is progressing rapidly, and folks are looking for alternatives to lithium.

The mining of which, or the development of which, or processing of which is much less damaging to our environment and to native peoples.

So my name is Zhenxing Feng.

I'm an associate professor in chemical engineering.

My research is focused on energy storage and energy conversions, and we want to improve this performance of this battery systems or we try to find a new way to a new chemistry for new type of battery stuff.

Everything here is kinda like a crowded mess, but that's how we, you know, share all these things because this part of lab is used by three professors.

Lithium ion battery is great, but definitely, you still have some challenges and problems with that.

We also want to find a relative for the lithium ion battery because the lithium limited in the earth shell.

We are working on something called the sodium ion battery.

Sodium is more earth abundant compared to lithium, and they have a similar ionic size and are relatively light compared to other elements.

So that's why it's also promising.

How does a a sodium ion battery compare to a lithium ion battery in terms of, its power output?

Yeah.

So that, actually depends on some of the other materials that we use to kinda, like, house the sodium.

The specific material that I'm using, Prussian Blue, actually has really high power capabilities.

It's a very open structure, so the sodium ions can go in and out very quickly, which also improves the rate that you can charge and discharge them.

Which actually makes it really great for grid applications where you'd have really high sudden loads where you need to charge or discharge it.

And what is Prussian blue?

It's an iron based compound that as the open framework that can store the sodium ions.

But it's also, like the name suggests, it's used as a blue pigment in a lot of famous artwork like the Great Wave.

You know, you can charge a battery in just, like, 16 seconds.

And their energy density, is not as good as a lithium battery, but it can be half of that.

So we're approaching that, and they can be cycled and used for, like, 6,000 cycles, even 120,000 cycles.

So that will last, like, 30 years.

So that's much better than the lithium ion battery.

Whether they use lithium, sodium, or another alternative material, batteries are essential for storing energy from renewable sources, like wind and solar.

However, another promising and well established energy storage technology is pumped hydro storage, which actually accounts for the vast majority of the world's current energy storage capacity.

Oregon is about to be home to the newest pumped storage facility located in Klamath County.

Yes.

Swan Lake is a closed loop pumped storage hydropower project.

Pump storage is the oldest and cheapest form of energy storage and currently accounts for 93 percent of all of the existing energy storage here in the United States.

There's 40 projects or so that are in operation, and the first one was built here, in the US over a hundred years ago.

It's a pretty simple type of project.

You build two artificial ponds or reservoirs on the landscape, a lower pond and an upper pond.

You fill the system with water, and then during periods of low electricity demand, you use wind and solar to pump water from the lower pond into the upper pond.

And then conversely, during periods of high electricity demand, but the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining, you release that water and you have on demand carbon free electricity.

So the project at Swan Lake is 393 megawatts in size and provides 9 1/2 hours of carbon free on demand electricity to a 125,000 homes.

It's exactly like a normal hydro facility except that it can work in reverse.

We could get stuck on a road like this.

Like, it it's imminently possible that it might happen, like, now.

You're a Portlander, right?

Yeah.

So the rain doesn't bother you one bit?

No.

No.

So right now, we are standing, in the vicinity of the Swan Lake Energy Storage Project.

The area that you see behind us is the escarpment that separates the lower and upper reservoirs.

The upper reservoir, about 60 acres in size, will sit up at the top, and then a powerhouse structure will sit just behind us here.

And then the lower reservoir will sit just beyond that on Grizzly Butte.

The penstock or pipes that connect the lower and upper reservoir are underground in this case.

And the penstock is you're talking about, like, the, you know, basically the tube that all the water goes through?

Yeah.

The shaft or the tunnel that connects the water from the lower reservoir to the upper reservoir itself.

And so basically the water, if you're like in power generation mode, flows down, comes through the powerhouse here, And then filters into the lower reservoir.

And in the reverse case, you're kinda pumping water actively using that excess energy, sending it Uphill for the next time you need it.

Yep.

This type of energy storage is 20 to 30 percent cheaper than lithium ion because it's built to last more than a century.

So a lot like our existing hydropower, once it's built and operating, it costs very little to operate it for a very long period of time unlike a lot of the battery storage that needs to be completely replaced every 15 years or so.

This is really a long duration or long period of time type of storage.

If you're looking for just 1 or 2 hours of energy storage, you know, lithium ion is likely a better tool.

But if you're really looking for a type of storage that will meet these large gaps, you know, when the wind really isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining, pump storage is a much better tool for a system that's gonna rely more and more on on wind and solar.

We have projected that there's 5,000 to 10,000 megawatts of energy storage that needs to be built in Oregon and Washington between now and the mid 2030s.

So this is a 400 megawatt slice of that.

Part of the reason that the project is here in Klamath County is that there's two substations on the transmission system that connect Southern California all the way up to Northern Washington here in Klamath County.

So we're about 30 miles north of the Malin substation where we connect in, and the project location in Swan Lake Valley was selected because it's primarily on private land and most importantly can utilize existing agricultural wells for water in a terminal basin where the wells have no connectivity to the Klamath Aquifer or any of the water rights issues that are often in the press in Klamath County in particular.

Not everyone in Klamath County supports the Swan Lake project.

The Klamath tribes oppose the chosen site due to its traditional cultural significance.

So the Klamath tribes are the Modoc, Klamath, and Yahooskin Paiute peoples.

The three of us were all placed together on this reservation after the Treaty of 1864.

I did notice this document up on the wall.

Is that the Treaty of 1864?

That is the Treaty of 1864, and, my three times great grandfather's mark is up there.

Klamath tribes are absolutely in favor of green energy projects, but not this one.

It's, one of the most sacred sites that we have.

We told them that it's the equivalent of setting off a bomb in the middle of Vatican City.

So it's just something that we could never condone.

Yeah.

Tell me why.

What's, what's special about that location?

Why is that place significant for you?

Well, you know, I wanna be careful.

I don't wanna say a whole lot about it except to say that it's a place where our ancestors have been for, you know, literally a millennia.

And we know that it was an important place for them to go and and to pray and and to be at one with, the creation.

We're careful not to try to say much more than that.

I'm sure you can imagine that, there's folks out there who would like to enrich themselves in in ways that are just, you know, sacrilegious and and offensive to us.

There've been at least 3 tribal councils who have opposed this project and opposed it as vehemently as we could, you know, within the confines of what the law allows.

The project area in general, Swan Lake Rim and Swan Lake Valley, has been used by the Klamath tribe since time immemorial.

And so any type of development there or impact, whether it's agriculture or, you know, this type of facility is going to raise concerns.

This is a federally regulated project, so the tribes have a nation to nation type of consultation.

We're able to work with the tribe and fully understand areas of concern to try and avoid traditional cultural properties to the extent we could, and that's, you know, in part why the project ended up with features where they are to avoid a lot of those impacts.

And where they can't be avoided, we've established a historic properties management plan and to have, you know, some type of mitigation, whether it's restoration of traditional plantings or some other type of curation.

Basically, if you don't own the property, you can't protect it.

You know, it's the National Historic Preservation Act.

It's just not, strong enough.

What it does allow for is, you know, quote unquote mitigation.

But I said, I said a moment ago, you know, if you set off a bomb in the middle of Vatican City and told Catholics, well, there was a statue over there that got blown up, right?

Or there was a fountain over there that got blown up.

So we're going to try and compensate you for that without recognizing the importance of the entire area.

And that's what this is.

It's a it's a cathedral for us.

There's just not enough money, on the planet to to mitigate for it.

Developers proposed a forty million dollar compensation package.

The funds were intended to support tribal land acquisition and create new community resources.

So when it got to that point, then it became about the company bringing folks to try to bargain with us.

And it was extremely divisive here.

You know, on the one side, you have those who say, look, this is blood money.

We should never take money for something like this.

Not only is it immoral, it's it's shameful to even think about it.

On the other side, you have folks saying, you know, look, you guys are being prideful.

None of us want this, but this is a whole lot of money that could go toward purchasing lands that we could then protect from something similar happening.

It could bring us a sober living facility for members who struggle with addiction issues.

It could help with education funds.

It could help us put up a living cultural center.

So if we've lost the fight, why not do what we can do for coming generations and avoid similar situations in the future?

You know, I can.

I can genuinely respect the different ways that, our members felt.

I believe it was the job of the council to try and create a damages package in negotiation with the company that was as lucrative as possible, and then put that vote in front of the membership.

So that's what we tried to do.

Our members rejected it at a general council meeting and just said, no.

We don't wanna go any further.

So that's that's the end of it.

But the project is still moving forward.

So it ultimately, it isn't something that you fundamentally actually had control over whether the project moved forward or not.

It was mostly I guess it was a matter of your approval, your your proving it or not, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

You know, I obviously, I can't speak for the company, but I think that they understand that public relations are important, and they probably didn't want a black eye from a battle with a with a tribe.

But at the end of the day, did any money change hands?

No.

So it's going forward and and ultimately Klamath tribes didn't get anything for it.

Yeah.

That's correct.

How do you feel about that?

How do you feel about this result that it's actually it's happening?

Well, like I said, I'm sad that it's happening.

I don't know any tribal members who are in favor of it.

I did my job to the best of my ability, which is, like I said, just putting the choice in front of the people or doing what I could to put the choice in front of the people.

Like any type of infrastructure, this type of project has some impacts.

You know, we've been able to work with public agencies like the Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, tribes like the Klamath Tribe avoiding spiritual areas and where we can't actually having a mitigation plan in place agreed to by the tribe and having monitors, you know, out in the project area during certain portions of project construction.

The National Historic Preservation Act requires that there be cultural monitors present.

It doesn't really have a lot of teeth.

I mean, for example, let's say worst case scenario, they come across human remains.

Then the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act kicks in.

Despite the name, it's not really a protection of graves.

Right?

I mean, we can stop the work.

I think it's a hundred days maximum.

You know, law enforcement would come in.

They'd make sure that they were tribal and not modern.

And then we would have something to say about what happens with those ancestors, but they would be removed, and we could we couldn't stop that.

The Klamath tribe's experience with Swan Lake is not entirely unique.

This situation echoes similar situations we've reported on with tribal members in the McDermott Caldera facing lithium mining and on the Oregon coast facing offshore wind.

Indigenous people have consistently expressed that they are not appropriately consulted in the earliest phases of infrastructure project development.

I would just say that it's really, really taxing and traumatic for tribal nations when we have to deal with these things.

And it would be so much better, not just for us politically, but for our mental health, for our spiritual health, for our community health, if we could start by being consulted with on the front end so that we're not having to come up against these very powerful companies who in their own way are trying to do good, but just do good without thinking through, you know, who they need to talk to first.

Yes.

We're pro green energy, but, yes, I think things could be thought out much more carefully, and tribes need much more forewarning.

Right?

We should be at the front of the consultation process rather than having to come in afterwards and saying, you know, no, not there.

It's just painful for us, and it it causes hard feelings, and and, you know, we don't need any more of that.

The Klamath tribes aren't the only group expressing opposition to the Swan Lake project.

Some farmers on adjacent land are worried that the presence of this project will have negative impacts on their livelihood.

My name is Del Fox.

I live here in Pine Flat on the eastern side.

I retired out of the air force in '96 and started farming here.

We can grow any kind of crop here.

I grow hay.

We've also done potatoes and doing garlic across the street.

Dell and others are concerned about the final approved route of transmission lines from Swan Lake to the Malin substation.

What they're going to do now, they're gonna this is Grizzly Butte.

They're gonna run it down here and run it across the farm ground.

This blue is all class 2 soil.

Coming down through here, taking out all these pivots.

Now a pivot is one of those sort of circular farm fields?

Yes.

It's irrigation that moves, on wheels.

But they take out all these pivots and run it through farm ground.

It's just a disaster.

Even though transmission lines are overhead and the poles themselves don't take up that much ground space, the nature of modern farming with pivot irrigation means even a single tower can disrupt a large chunk of otherwise fertile farmland.

You can't turn a pivot through the pole.

So what now what do you do?

But they wanna bring it down.

You know, see all that green over there along the bottom of that ridge?

That's what they wanna come through.

It'll take all that out.

So then those pivots would not be there anymore and essentially no farming activity would be would continue.

Yeah.

It's not economical to pay some way to move a wheel line.

And if you can't run it with a pivot, you're just not gonna make any money and so you it goes.

That pivot right there would be disappearing.

The lines are gonna come right through here, yeah, toward that hollow over there, take out this pivot, that pivot.

All these have to go.

This is Leonard Jesperson's ranch.

How does he feel about this power line plan?

You can imagine he does not want to lose all this ground.

If you can't irrigate it, you you've lost it.

This controversy over transmission lines near Swan Lake reflects a larger challenge in the renewable energy transition.

When even minor spans of new transmission line create conflict, how are we going to upgrade the transmission system to move renewable electricity from rural sources to the towns and cities where it's needed.

Well, that's one of our big challenges.

The siting issues around additional transmission are enormous.

Boardmen to Hemminway line just got approved.

I think there's 10 years of studies, and permits, and discussions around siting that additional transmission line by Idaho Power.

If we don't figure this out, we'll be really stymied.

We have a fascinating grid in the west.

It is characterized by long distance transmission.

We have had some of the longest distance transmission of anywhere in the United States as far back as the 1970s with the Pacific DC intertie, which was the first high voltage direct current intertie in the United States and was certainly and still is the longest distance by far.

Our generation mix is changing from a conventional dispatchable fossil fire mix to one that's more and more and will be predominantly powered by renewable energy sources.

Those sources depend more on transmission.

Before, you could put a gas plant wherever it was convenient.

But other types of generation, that's gonna require longer distance transmission.

These resources are robust in certain places that might be inconveniently located compared to where loads are.

The best wind resource is not in the biggest city of the country.

There are places where we can develop that have very good base wind, where we could do some great development of renewable facilities, but they're not by transmission.

Our long term resource planning has considered offshore wind.

Wherever the resource is, you have to get that power to where the customers are.

In most cases, that is a significant transmission interconnection.

I've just concluded a 2 year study with my team that has looked at optimizing transmission systems to harness the really great wind resource, which falls between Florence, Oregon and north of Eureka, California.

There aren't many people living in this general area.

I mean, there are towns, but they're relatively small towns and there are parts of the coastline where really they're they're uninhabited.

So in terms of transmission, it is a desert, transmission desert in this area, but it's precisely the place where we would need to pull the energy ashore and bring it to load centers on the West Coast.

Transmission is probably one of the more expensive and politically difficult pieces of infrastructure that utilities build.

We typically involve both public land and private property, and we have to acquire rights of way over those properties.

And so we work with the owners, whoever they are, on the mapping of a route, and it's usually a years long process.

And there's, of course, a detailed environmental review process that itself can take several years.

There is a regulatory approval process.

It starts at the state level.

We usually have to approach a utility commission for approval on a transmission route.

Of course, there's local land use policies, and that gets down to the county and municipal level.

There's a lot of permitting process and a robust series of public hearings.

There are always many questions.

Why does it have to go here?

Why can't it go here?

And we do have some flexibility on routing.

But generally, because of our legal mandate to produce a least cost, least risk resource mix, and given that, the reality that the shortest distance between 2 points is a straight line, the shorter the overall route, the better.

Ultimate determination of an exact route is a very extensive process.

The transmission corridor that extends 30 miles to the Malin substation, that was a a big portion of the state and federal permitting process.

We had to go through a full public alternatives analysis where we had to scope 6 different routes.

That was a very public process, lots of participation.

Our company selected the least impactful viable route.

You could see now where that ridge was on the top.

You you could get your camera pointed at that.

That's where we want everything to go.

Like I said, when they offered the tribes 40 million dollars, they have money.

They can do it.

The corridor that we have that's in the permit is a path that has the least amount of impacts on irrigation pivots in particular without having large impacts to cultural resources up on the rim.

So there is a trade off.

We did look at routing transmission away from irrigation, specifically in the valley and up on the rim, but the potential cultural resource impacts were great in choosing that particular route.

And we've worked with landowners to move the project transmission towers away from circle pivots where we can, and we largely can avoid a lot of those circle pivots and where we can't, those landowners are compensated.

If you've got any land that's got water on it out here, it's at least $5,000 a day.

But if you can't irrigate it, it's not worth anything.

We're very protective of farm ground in Klamath County.

Everybody is, especially the producers.

We should be.

Right?

We we don't need to cover up the fields that feed us.

I believe it's a legitimate concern.

At the end of the day, the route is approved by FERC.

However they decide to put those power lines through is done so that the project is actually viable.

Every inch of line is extremely expensive.

This is what Leonard puts this stuff up.

Everything is all covered and serviced and ready to go for the spring.

He's got a huge investment here.

They want to destroy it.

I think that anytime you're gonna have some type of a big project that's absolutely different, changes the landscape a little bit, that you're going to have some opposition.

One thing that I would say, and this is commending both the folks that have concern and the project developer, as they were both very available and very vocal and willing to talk about their concerns.

Not everything can always be addressed.

Right?

Because the only way you're gonna address every concern is just not to build something.

But I would say that they were engaged enough to make it to where we felt it was an overall benefit to the community.

I talked to commissioner De Groot myself.

I had to do his campaign finance reporting.

What's the community here like in general?

Does everybody kinda know each other out here in this area?

Yep.

Yep.

We're all farmers, and, everybody seems to get along.

Is he gonna pull off so we can get by?

I'll tell you what.

These are the sweetest people on earth.

They are thank you.

Pull off the road and stop this work.

That's Leonard right there on that track.

What does it take to be a good farmer here in the Klamath Basin?

Hard work and lots of money.

What we need to do first is simply develop a map and a general agreement of where transmission needs to exist in order for us to get our clean energy goals.

And then we need to take on the next step which is okay, how are we gonna actually build that grid?

The very good news is that people who are in the right places are really coming together to look at transmission.

We need to think about ways to plan systems between regions a bit better because we haven't really developed much interregional transmission at all.

And it's it requires that kind of long distance sharing of resources to truly provide a grid that will be decarbonized, but also as reliable and resilient as we've come to expect it to be.

So the US then breaks up this system into interconnection zones.

You know, ours is the Western Electricity Coordinating Council, the WEC.

The system where you've got utility generators and independent power producers, numerous transmission grids in the northwest, balancing authorities to make all sure this thing works correctly.

And then you can see how this system gets really complicated really fast with a lot of players in it.

To deal with all that, we've created some markets, and we've created some organizations that will help us organize that and create that reliability that helps keep our lights on all the time.

These organizations that manage the day to day flow of energy within a large system are called independent system operators or ISOs or a regional transmission organization or RTO.

They're responsible for optimizing the dispatch of all of these different resources on the transmission system to get to a not only reliable system but the lowest cost system.

In the northwest, we still have an organized system, but it's not operated by a central entity.

We have, like, thirty different utilities or balancing authorities that are all doing their own thing within their transmission system and balancing their own needs.

So the system actually has worked great for decades, and it's worked very reasonably well, and and we have some of the lowest rates in the country.

And it's kept the lights on.

It's very been very reliable.

But numerous studies have shown that an RTO in the northwest would, through that efficiency and optimization, actually save us billions of dollars.

Also, what an RTO does, it's an organized transmission system that can figure out where the transmission needs to go, and it's authorized to build it and pay for it.

And right now, it's very difficult to do that because it's 2 or 3 entities get together and decide to build this one.

And so an RTO entity could potentially help do that in a much more efficient, effective, and faster way.

Pacific Corp is not opposed to such an arrangement assuming it's done correctly.

Utilities originally built the transmission systems that they own and operate, principally to serve customers in their service areas.

When you're talking about creating a separate entity to operate that system, ownership and control are big issues.

We've been talking about this for 30 years.

The issue isn't a financial one, but a political one.

So in order to have an RTO created in the northwest, all of these separate 30 or so independent entities would have to give up their authority and their control to this independent system operator, and there will be winners and losers in that.

So recently, the northwest states have got together with California and created the Westwide Governance Pathways Initiative.

Kind of a mouthful.

But basically, what it is is a way of thinking about how do you do this governance of this RTO in the northwest, including California?

And how do we prevent California from dominating it because they're such a big player?

And so that's been a recent change in the way this conversation is going.

You need to stay tuned on how that act actually gonna play out.

But that's a big, big change.

We're more reliant upon transmission and we're reliant upon control of those networks and the control of transmission systems in a way that perhaps we weren't before.

So there's an opportunity there for modernization under a host of threats that weren't there before.

So that's another piece.

There's a changing climate.

So we have different extremes, you know?

Now we have wildfires in the west on an annual basis.

How do you operate transmission networks in in that kind of environment?

Wildfire has become a really serious problem.

We have been developing plans, parameters, and systems for responding to wildfire.

We have dealt with wildfire dangers for many, many years on our system.

But, these large conflagrations that we've been faced with represent a whole new order of challenge.

That's a very controversial topic.

So we have, as a society, moved out into these very rural areas that are very remote, and we've got power lines running through forests, and we expect it to work like an urban system, and it doesn't.

We have a system now in place called emergency power shutoffs.

If red flags start coming up, temperature's high, winds are coming, they shut down the power system to prevent wildfire being started by lines hitting trees, or trees going through the power lines and doing anything like that.

There's a downside associated with that.

If you're on a respirator that runs on electricity and your batteries happen to fail, that's a big problem if they do an emergency power shutoff.

And we've got generators going on all over the place that might spark and create a fire.

Nothing is as simple as the reverse seems like, just shut the power off and all this will go away.

That's not gonna happen.

One of the things that we've been doing for the last several years is identifying areas of higher risk, installing insulated lines in some of these areas, putting some of those lines underground where it makes sense.

It's delicate balance because of the cost involved, but because of the way that fire seasons have extended and fire behavior has changed, it's become an absolute necessity.

It'll cost an enormous amount of money to put everything underground, so that's not really realistic.

So we still have to deal with these this overhead system that is in areas that are quite vulnerable.

We have devices such as recloser switches, fuses that protect the distribution system from damage, from faults if a if a tree falls, hits a line.

You know, some of these devices can emit a spark when a fault happens.

We're working to replace a lot of those devices with ones that will not produce an ignition source when they're activated.

For individuals and businesses where they might lose all their refrigeration and all their food and things like that, having a system like the the Talent Middle School where they have a solar panel on their roof with a big battery system so they can run the freezer in the refrigerator during one of those crises they can ride through.

That's kind of resilience that I think is gonna get built into the system more and more and more.

The challenges presented by environmental threats like wildfire are an important driver for modernizing the grid.

But modernization can also optimize energy networks for greater efficiency and reliability, especially important in a future paradigm where intermittent renewable energy makes up the majority of the energy supply.

Smart grids.

Is that a thing you think about?

Do you know what a smart grid is?

Can you tell me what a smart grid is?

The transmission grid, the main transmission grid is already pretty smart.

We have a lot of computer control systems on that.

It's monitored in real time to be able to control the flow of power remotely and respond to outages without having to send somebody to do something.

And we have that capability really down to the distribution substation.

It's beyond that distribution substation where we can really take advantage of a lot more smart technology, computerized technology, metering systems that will allow for two way communications between us and our customers that will give them a lot more information about how they're using electricity and what it costs because it, you know, it does vary throughout the day.

Smart grids are something that can be handled within a distribution grid.

It would have the ability to go as far as changing the temperature settings in a house.

If we're in a hot day and we're reaching our capacity electricity wise, they may be able to turn off the electric vehicle chargers or some different appliances to help us keep our load within the limits that we need to keep it in.

It'll allow us to have smaller generation plants, fewer power plants, because we're able to modulate how and where energy is being used.

Utility customers can also appreciate the smart grid concepts and that they can maintain styles of living in temperatures for the most part and still be contributing to balancing the electric grid.

So you're kinda talking in terms of someone could look at like an app on their phone and find out, oh, you know, between the hours of 3:00 and 5:00, wow, the power is really expensive.

And then maybe if they have a smart home, they can set their appliances to turn off during those times a day and save some money.

Yeah.

And we know as utility managers that the biggest consumers of energy in homes is to keep spaces cool.

You know, home air conditioning systems, refrigerators, freezers.

I think it would be useful for many customers to be able to know, how much am I paying for my air conditioning every month?

How much is how much it cost to run my refrigerator?

Being able to see that as a component of their bill would be would be very helpful.

I mean, we don't have that capability right now.

Is there work being done towards making that a reality potentially?

Yeah.

I think so.

One of the things that is a challenge for utilities is that our investment in equipment to serve customers tends to be very durable.

A lot of the stuff that we install lasts for decades.

And so as we look at changing the design of those systems, there has to be a serious cost benefit analysis applied.

The transition to new technologies in our industry is sometimes a lot slower than people would like.

It is an essential public service.

Any change in the local distribution system always has to be done with an eye toward what's the impact on the customer.

I think we have to think even if one wants to use a grid 1.0 versus 2.0, it's a transition to a 2.0 So that's where the term modernization, it sort of hints at a process.

If we don't get our transmission system handled, we're only gonna achieve 20 to 30 percent of the renewables that we need to achieve in order to get to our greenhouse gas emission reduction goals.

Well, those very big projects are gonna have some siting challenges.

And yet, I think they're pretty intriguing because the promise that they offer in terms of storage is huge.

It's just developing those projects, finding the land, getting the local support, working through all the people who have something to say about what you wanna do is pretty monumental.

Oh, boy.

Okay.

Yeah.

It's getting goopy here.

Alright.

You might sink in a little bit.

This might be where we stop.

The weather is here today.

How long have you personally actually been working on this project?

I'v been on this project for 10 years.

Wow.

So it's kind of a career almost.

Yeah.

Long time.

Yeah.

10 years.

There is no way to live that doesn't have some impact.

Everything, even if it's green, still has some kind of consequences for the environment.

So sure, you know, lithium batteries, cars, moving away from fossil fuels, that's a good thing.

But then you've got the issues with the mining, you've got the issues with how you get rid of that stuff once it's out used its life.

Anything that requires resources.

Just eating, right?

How's my shower get heated this morning?

Where does the power from that, you know, come from?

Probably from a dam up on the Columbia.

I'm 25.

He's 29, so we're on the younger end of things still.

Yes.

I I have children that age.

No you don't.

Really?

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

You look great.

So You have a granddaughter as well, don't you?

I have a granddaughter.

Yeah.

You're gonna have a nice big family one day.

I mean, you already do, it sounds like, but big.

It's coming.

Yeah.

I'm excited for that.

Are you hopeful about the future of Klamath County of Oregon?

Absolutely.

Klamath County is in a renaissance period right now.

We're seeing growth that we haven't seen in decades.

Since I've been in office, we've closed 26 projects.

We have 57 or 58 projects on the books of people that are looking to move their companies here, make developments in Klamath County.

We're growing extraordinarily fast.

You know, we have transmission problems.

We have siting problems.

But the real question is, do we have the political will to actually do the work?

If we have the political will, we will move forward on a balanced basis listening to local voices, but we won't let the perfect get in the way of the good.

Energy Horizons is made possible in part by The Elizabeth Maughan Charitable Foundation, The Four Way Community Foundation, and by the members of Southern Oregon PBS.

Thank you.