Do the Math: Climate Matters — and So Does Keeping Homes Heated

By Kurt Miller, CEO & Executive Director, Northwest Public Power Association

In a recent Seattle Times op-ed, longtime climate advocate KC Golden called for "an accurate sense of proportion" about blackout risks and rising energy costs related to climate policies. He's right — proportion is exactly what the Northwest's energy debate needs. But a sense of proportion isn't a slogan; it's a math problem, and the test has to be applied in both directions, including to the Pacific Northwest's own climate laws.

Mr. Golden implies that softening these laws means more climate-related stress on the grid. So let's do the math. Oregon and Washington together account for roughly 0.3% of global CO2 emissions, and the electric grid and natural gas heating — what laws like Washington's Climate Commitment Act and Clean Energy Transformation Act and Oregon's 100% clean electricity mandate actually regulate — are a smaller share still.

If both states implement every one of these laws fully and flawlessly, will the storms, heat domes, and wildfire smoke Mr. Golden warns of go away?

They will not.

That's not an argument against cutting emissions. It's an argument for honesty about what these policies can deliver — because their costs are not global and diffuse. They are concrete and local: rising electric rates, and a grid stretched thinner at the very moments families depend on it most.

Climate matters. So does whether people can afford to heat their homes. When benefits are asserted and costs waved away, the people who pay the price are ratepayers, not advocates. Pushing back on that isn't climate denial. It's arithmetic.

A word about where I sit in this debate. I lead the Northwest Public Power Association, which serves more than 150 not-for-profit, community-owned electric utilities across the West. My members sell electricity, not natural gas. They answer to the customers they serve, not to shareholders, and they have no financial stake in the gas industry — if anything, policies that push heating onto the grid would grow their sales. So, when someone in my position says the region still needs its gas system, it isn't self-interest talking; it’s community interest.

The problem isn't AI. It's January.

Most of the public energy conversation right now is about data centers. But the hardest problem facing the Northwest grid is a familiar one: winter. Heating demand is sharply peaked, weather-driven, and spread across millions of homes — and it spikes precisely when Northwest wind and solar produce the least amount of energy.

During prolonged cold, heat pump efficiency degrades and backup resistance heating kicks in, creating needle peaks at exactly the wrong moment for grid operators.

We've already seen the preview. Over Martin Luther King Jr. weekend in January 2024, an Arctic blast pushed the regional grid to its limit: the Northwest was importing nearly 5,000 megawatts, wind generation collapsed across much of the region, and an unexpected outage hit Jackson Prairie, the region's largest gas storage field. The Western Power Pool called it a tipping point; rolling blackouts were narrowly avoided.

Here's the part of that story that rarely gets told: on the coldest day, direct-use natural gas supplied more than 70% of the region's total energy needs. Millions of homes stayed warm without adding a single megawatt of demand to a grid that had nothing left to give — a vast, distributed reliability asset that no wire or four-hour battery can easily replicate.

The warning is on record

The April 2026 resource adequacy study from Energy and Environmental Economics (E3) — the one The Seattle Times editorial board said "should alarm every Washingtonian" — projects a shortfall of roughly 9 gigawatts of dependable electricity by 2030 under a low-hydro, cold-snap scenario, widening to 14 to 18 gigawatts by 2035.

Nine gigawatts is more than Oregon's entire average demand. And the driver of continued growth after that isn't data centers. It's building electrification — policies that require a wholesale shift of heating load from the gas system onto the grid — which E3 projects could raise regional winter peak demand by nearly 30 gigawatts by 2045, roughly equivalent to adding another Northwest hydropower system.

The same study points to a practical answer hiding in plain sight: a policy shift to hybrid heat pumps — electric heat pumps with natural gas backup — could shave up to 7 gigawatts off the region's 2045 resource need. The gas system, in other words, isn't the obstacle to an affordable energy transition. It's one of the most powerful tools we have for pulling it off.

What this means for policy

None of this is an argument against decarbonization. Significant progress is achievable and necessary, and both the gas and electric sectors are committed to it. It is an argument about how we get there without leaving families cold or bills unaffordable.

In practice, that means three things: permit new natural gas peaking generation as a bridge until clean, firm technologies are commercially mature; pace electrification mandates to the rate at which new generation and transmission can actually be built; and recognize direct-use natural gas heating for what it proved to be in January 2024 — a reliability resource that keeps winter's worst peaks from ever reaching the grid.

The Northwest's energy strength has always come from diversity: hydro and thermal, wind and solar, pipe and wire working in concert. The answer to the decade ahead is not all-electric or all-gas, but a smarter, better-integrated combination of both. Every climate policy this region adopts will be judged by its cost, both in terms of electric bills and energy reliability. The policies that survive will be the ones whose authors did the math.