The US state of Oregon has become the first to vote for a complete ban on coal-generated power. By 2035, at the latest, the state’s utility companies must ensure none of the electricity they provide comes from coal.
And, by 2040, at least half of the state’s energy must come from renewable resources, under the Clean Energy and Coal Transition Act, voted into law by the country’s legislature yesterday.
In addition, utilities will be obliged to support integrating renewable energy into the grid and help speed up the installation of charging stations for electric vehicles.
Oregon has only one coal-fired power station, which is already due to shut down in 2020. But it imports one-third of its electricity from coal-fired plants in states of Montana, Utah and Wyoming.
The act may well thus reduce emissions in other states if it reduces their coal use, says Noah Long of the US Natural Resources Defense Council.
The two major utility companies in the state, Portland General Electric and Pacific Power, actively backed the deal, which was passed 38-20 in a vote in the state’s Senate and was also backed by Oregon’s utility consumer advocate.
“It was a negotiated process and everyone had different reasons for entering,” says Long. “For the utility companies it means long-term certainty.”
Pacific Power, for example, owns many coal-fired plants across the western United States, he says. “They have a bunch of ageing coal plants which they know that they cannot run forever and this gives them a pathway for a regulated exit,” he adds.
In neighbouring California there is no outright ban on coal, but its carbon law aims to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. It is also committed to obtaining half of its electricity from renewable resources by 2030.
“The Oregon approach is just a much more direct and much more explicit way of achieving the same ends,” says Samuel Adams of the World Resources Institute in Washington DC.
States such as California, New York, Vermont and Hawaii began regulating carbon emissions about 15 years ago and are now tightening them, says Long.
Meanwhile, the Clean Power Plan, unveiled by President Barack Obama in August 2015, which sets a national limit on carbon pollution produced from power plants, is languishing after the Supreme Court last month ordered a halt to its enforcement.
The plan has helped make big utility companies like Pacific Power realise that they will at some point have to stop using coal to generate electricity, says Long, and they would rather do it in a planned way with a long lead time and government support than some other way.
So, he says, the plan has probably helped sway them to support Oregon’s decision.
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