Foster Hildreth, CEO of OPALCO, Vince Dauciunas, chair of its board, and Jay Kimball, consultant, appeared before our County Council in a work session on Feb. 10 and alerted the Council of the need to act now to avert economic loss and injury to health.

Kimball showed the Council a series of slides indicating that the Northwest Grid is now at the crossover point where from now on, at times of maximum need, demand will exceed available power.

Dauciunas reminded the Council that in January 2024 (remember those temperatures?), the entire Western Grid was in immediate danger of collapse, proof that we had already reached the tipping point. There will be no new hydropower, and reduced snowpack has diminished our region’s summer hydro reserve. Think of grid failure as a very violent multicar/bus/truck smashup, but silent as everything stops and goes dark. He pointed out that the County is now at imminent risk of sharing the fate of the mainland in a regional power shortfall.

Hildreth ended the presentation by saying that OPALCO has a duty imposed by the Legislature to provide power, but that is only possible if the County cooperates in this effort. OPALCO and the county will need to work together to provide resilience to our islands and because of changing funding circumstances, time is short.

I think it’s important to note that this is not solely a “climate” or ideological issue. The rapid adoption of electric power in transportation, industry, heating, consumer electronics (think Big Screen!) and information processing (a city-scale consumer) are together the major cause of increasing hazards, holding CPAP masks (with batteries, I hope), home hemodialysis machines and refrigerated insulin, internet, battery and phone chargers and much more as hostage.

Bill Appel,

San Juan Island