Source: Forbes, James Conca, Feb 4, 2020
While many states have announced they want to be net-zero carbon by 2040 or so, Washington State is likely to achieve it.
Of course, it helps that we already have the lowest carbon footprint of any state in the Union. With 86% hydro, nuclear and wind as our electricity generation, it’s hard to beat. Our last coal plant is retiring in 2025.
Washington State passed the Clean Energy Transformation Act (CETA) which commits Washington to an electricity supply free of greenhouse gas emissions by 2045.
And recently our House passed HB1110, a Low Carbon Fuel Standard. This is critical – transportation is a bigger problem in Washington than power generation from the standpoint of carbon emissions, and even harder to address, so you need a two-pronged strategy.
This was born out in a new study by Energy + Environmental Economics (E3) and released last week by Energy Northwest. E3 is a San Francisco-based consulting group that calculated energy capacity needs in the Pacific Northwest over the next several decades and analyzed a suite of clean, reliable and affordable energy resources available to meet that demand.