Portland General Electric achieves renewable power milestone with help from eastern Montana winds

Portland General Electric, which provides power to nearly 2 million Oregonians across 51 cities, is celebrating a renewable energy milestone — generating 1 gigawatt of wind energy for its customers in a single day. That’s enough energy to power about 830,000 homes, according to the company.

This was possible after the company acquired nearly half of the power available at the Clearwater Wind Energy Center located in eastern Montana. The wind farm began producing energy for PGE earlier this year.

The park can produce up to 775 megawatts of wind power per day. PGE has 311 of those megawatts, said Lee Recchia, the company’s senior manager of grid control.

Currently, the wind power from Clearwater Wind Energy Center wind farm contributes about 34% of PGE’s daily wind generation. In total, the company has about 1.4 gigawatts of wind energy in its portfolio.

“It’s fantastic and it’s helping us meet our clean energy goals in the future,” Recchia said.

According to Recchia, PGE’s peak load, or the highest amount of electricity consumed by its customers at once, is about 4.5 gigawatts in a day. One gigawatt is about a quarter of the company’s total peak load. That is a lot of energy, he said.

“Overall, in our renewable portfolio, wind is our biggest amount that we’ve got in renewables,” he said.

PGE acquires wind energy for its customers from four wind farms throughout Oregon, Washington and Montana. Since wind power from Clearwater wind farm came online earlier this year, the company achieved another milestone — producing the utility’s maximum capacity of 1 gigawatt of power on 26 days so far during the year, Recchia said.

“That means that we had the wind blowing in all of our four major parks to get us up to that amount of energy,” he said.

The highest-producing day was Feb.26.

The shift from using fossil fuels to power homes to sources like wind is ramping up as electric utilities inch closer to renewable energy benchmarks they’re required to meet at the end of the decade and then ten years later. Ultimately, House Bill 2021 requires electric utilities like PGE and Pacific Power to have net-neutral carbon emissions by 2040.

But for a utility to meet those mandates, it has to seek renewable energy from outside state lines and work with other utilities, and experts say doing so will be one of the ways Oregon can meet its climate goals. PGE’s Clearwater Wind Farm is an example of working with partners and utilities across state lines as well as using regional transmission lines, which used to transport power made from coal, to transport the renewable energy hundreds of miles from where it was produced.

“What’s really important about this park is that it’s in Montana, so it’s far away from us, but we use existing transmission lines to bring it in, and it gives us a diversity in our wind portfolio so that if one of our wind parks doesn’t have wind, Montana is pretty consistent,” Recchia said.

PGE partnered with a subsidiary of NextEra Energy Resources LLC, which operates and owns part of the Clearwater Wind Energy Center. NextEra Energy Resources is a wind and solar operator.

Because power is brought through existing transmission lines, Recchia said, PGE was able to avoid building out additional new transmission lines, which could have taken more than a decade to complete.

That’s a big deal, said Travis Douville, the wind energy grid integration portfolio manager at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

“It’s very difficult to put in new transmission projects these days,” he said. “It’s hard to permit anything, certainly much harder than it was, I think we can all agree, decades ago. The first thing we need to do is use our existing transmission corridors and our existing transmission assets to their fullest potential.”

Douville said there are many benefits to more fully using these existing transmission corridors to supply renewable electricity, like the power grid’s capacity alleviating costs for ratepayers rather than building out new transmission.

Another benefit of receiving power from outside of state lines is that it balances the power grid and increases energy security during extreme weather events. Douville said. For example, if Oregon experiences another heat dome event that could add stress to the local power system, he said the Montana wind farm could provide the energy needed to help keep the power on.

Overall, Douville said the wind farm is a “fantastic story of reusing some of that grid that we’ve built in the past” that used to transport coal power into the state.

He calls that “building the grid larger than the weather.”

The Clearwater Wind Energy Center was a proposal selected from a 2021 competitive bidding process.

PGE is currently looking at eight proposals that could generate 1.7 gigawatts. If the projects are selected, development could begin by the end of 2027.