100% clean electricity in Washington state: Achievable, affordable and reliable

The following is a contributed article by Adam Maxwell, government relations director at Audubon Washington, with contributions from Caleb Heeringa, Sierra Club; Sean O'Leary, Northwest Energy Coalition; and Vlad Guttman, Climate Solutions. The dramatic drop in the price of clean energy in recent years is rapidly transforming the electric utility industry. Over the course of the last decade, clean energy resources like wind and solar have become cheaper than coal power and are now cost-competitive with "natural" gas. This trend is projected to continue, particularly given that wind and solar have no fuel costs while gas plants will forever be tied to the fluctuating cost of gas, two-thirds of which comes from the environmentally destructive process of hydraulic fracturing. Last fall, Western Washington got a stark reminder of the cost, reliability issues and shear danger of having an electricity grid reliant on fracked gas when a pipeline explosion in British Columbia almost led to region-wide power outages.