Balancing the Grid: Why Natural Gas Remains Essential in the Northwest’s Clean Energy Transition

As the Pacific Northwest accelerates toward a low-carbon future, policymakers and planners face a growing tension: how to balance affordability, reliability, and environmental performance in a grid increasingly shaped by data center expansion, electrification, and climate volatility. A recent policy brief from The Heartland Institute converges on a critical message—natural gas is a foundational component of a resilient and reliable clean energy future.

Heartland’s policy brief, Affordable, Reliable, and Clean, evaluates seven electric generation sources across three metrics: cost, reliability, and environmental impact. Its findings are stark. Natural gas scores highest overall, making it the most balanced resource among affordability, dependability, and environmental performance. The study assigns natural gas the lowest cumulative score, followed by nuclear and hydropower. Wind and solar, are favored for their zero-emission generation, but have high system integration costs, land use intensity, and reliability limitations.

On affordability, natural gas outperforms all other sources due to its low levelized full system cost. Intermittent renewables are inexpensive unless hidden grid costs—such as the need for spinning reserves and backup capacity—are factored in. Wind and solar also incur infrastructure burdens, like long-distance transmission lines and battery storage systems, which raise costs for utilities and ratepayers alike.

From a reliability standpoint, natural gas remains unmatched. Natural gas generation isn’t weather dependent and can ramp quickly to match demand to variable supply, an essential feature as renewable penetration increases. Heartland also underscores the unique advantage of on-site fuel storage for gas, coal, and biomass, which enhances resiliency during supply chain disruptions.

According to the Heartland report, natural gas has a moderate environmental footprint. It emits significantly less CO₂ than coal or biomass, avoids the land-use intensity of wind and solar, and imposes minimal direct harm to wildlife and ecosystems. Its environmental impact is proportionately lower when viewed through a holistic lens of emissions, land use, and pollution.

A recent comprehensive literature review led by Guidehouse for the Pacific Northwest Utilities Conference Committee (PNUCC) and the Northwest Gas Association (NWGA) amplifies these findings through the lens of real-world utility planning in the Pacific Northwest. It reviews 19 authoritative studies and synthesizes key trends shaping the region’s energy landscape. Its central message is clear: maintaining grid reliability amid growing electrification and extreme weather risks demands deeper gas-electric coordination—and greater recognition of the critical role natural gas continues to play.

One of the report’s key findings is that current planning frameworks are “siloed,” with electric and gas systems modeled independently. This disconnect obscures the cascading risks that can occur when both systems are stressed during peak events. For example, as more homes switch from gas to electric heating, cold snaps simultaneously strain both systems. Without integrated planning, this overlap can lead to blackouts, fuel shortages, or both.

Natural gas, Guidehouse notes, was indispensable during the January 2024 cold snap, when electric load soared and renewable generation faltered. Even in highly decarbonized scenarios, gas-fired power provides critical grid-balancing services that batteries or hydrogen storage cannot yet deliver at scale. Guidehouse calls for expanded platforms—like the PNUCC/NWGA collaboration—to build joint planning models, improve operational visibility, and align infrastructure investments.

Additionally, Guidehouse stresses that natural gas enables flexibility beyond emergency situations. Hybrid heating technologies, for example, can shift demand between electricity and gas depending on weather or system stress, effectively reducing peak loads and infrastructure costs. This type of flexible demand response is exactly the kind of cross-sector innovation needed to ensure affordability while decarbonizing.

Taken together, the Heartland and Guidehouse analyses offer a compelling policy directive: policy makers and planners should focus on smart integration strategies that leverage the strengths of natural gas infrastructure while pursuing long-term decarbonization goals. This doesn’t mean abandoning wind, solar, or storage. It means recognizing that a zero-carbon grid built on intermittent power and constrained transmission is neither reliable nor affordable without a robust and responsive backbone—one that natural gas is uniquely positioned to provide.

Both documents also challenge the conventional narrative that views energy policy as a binary choice between gas and renewables. A better lens is one of coordination, where each technology is valued for its contribution to a stable, clean, and economically viable grid. That means rethinking metrics, planning assumptions, and regulatory models to reflect total energy system value—not just the marginal cost of the next megawatt-hour.

As the Northwest prepares for an energy future marked by greater electrification, data center demand, and climate volatility, the combined insights from Heartland and Guidehouse provide a grounded, data-driven roadmap. Policymakers, regulators, and utilities must act with urgency to develop integrated, cross-sector strategies that prioritize not only carbon reduction but also system reliability and consumer affordability. In this new era of energy transformation, natural gas is a critical part of the solution.