Last week, our hippie brethren in Burlington, Vermont, made a big announcement that (surprisingly) didn’t have to do with Phish. Thanks to the purchase of the Winooski One hydroelectric facility, the city’s electricity is now officially 100 percent powered by renewable energy sources—a national milestone. But Seattle City Light spokesman Scott Thomsen says not to get too jealous: Seattle is already 94.2 percent powered by renewable sources (98.6 if you count nuclear).
Seattle, however, doesn’t have a stated goal of going 100 percent renewable—Washington state’s goals as a whole are slightly different, partly because we’ve been able to rest on the laurels of our vast “legacy” hydroelectric projects, which have provided 75 percent of the state’s energy for decades. Due to a 2006 initiative, state utilities have a mandate to obtain 15 percent of their electricity portfolio from new renewable resources like solar and wind by 2020.
We asked Thomsen to name three ways Seattle City Light is pushing Seattle’s new renewable-energy resources beyond our already plentiful hydro resources to meet the 2020 criteria, and here’s what he told us.
Turn putrid into power “We’ve got a landfill gas project in Columbia Ridge in Oregon where Seattle’s trash is taken. Basically, as Seattle’s trash decomposes, it creates methane gas, which is then collected and burned to generate electricity, which we are then buying back from Waste Management. It comes right back here to the place that generated the garbage that got sent down there. It’s a nice little circle. Later this month, an expansion there will come online and double the production—and we’re buying all the additional electricity it produces.”
Ride the wind “We’ve already got a big piece of wind production coming from the Stateline Wind Farm out East, but we are considering and will review all kinds of proposals for anything and everything that will help us achieve our goal for new renewables—more wind, biomass projects [turning dead/decaying organic material into electricity], and even some dairy gas projects [turning cow manure into electricity by heating it up].”
Turn it down “We get credit towards our goal for continuing to effectively promote energy conservation, and we are very committed to doing that. Whether it’s better lighting, heat pumps, just any number of energy-efficient means to continue doing what you’re doing but use less energy—that’s step one, really.”
ksears@seattleweekly.com
Art Credit: “Trash” by Filip and “Renewable Energy” by Carlos Dias from The Noun Project.
