Our modernity is as unstable as the next power outage. In an electrically dependent world, discordant appliances humming in your office or home environment can affect your mood, and the various power stations churning out voltage for us day and night affect our larger environment.
This last point is the one that takes up so much space in news reports, community meetings and campaign speeches. Everything is becoming connected to global climate change. Given that our appetite for the markers of convenience and modernity result in the alteration of our Earth’s environment, we are beginning to think about each decision that we make as having an impact on our ecological systems.
Even more than that, we’re recognizing that environmentally motivated lifestyle choices don’t just affect the ‘natural’ environment, but have interrelated impacts on economic and political systems. All of this is often simplified under the current buzz word “sustainability” as people and organizations look for ways to provide convenient and modern goods and services while minimizing environmental impacts.
A common factor in all sustainability equations is energy. A lot of attention is given to liquid petroleum fuels and possible renewable replacements, but if one had to make the decision of giving up either the convenience of trucked products and personal vehicles or the convenience of electricity, people would realize the understated importance of electricity.
As far as electrical energy goes here in Eugene, our dominant hand seems safe for the time being. With so much pressure on the energy industry to clean up emissions, we are blessed by geography. While about half of our nation’s electricity comes from coal-fired plants, we get about 95 percent of our electricity from sources that do not produce greenhouse gasses.
This number is a not only a result of our region’s bounty of hydro-electricity, but also a result of environmental foresight nationally, regionally and locally. In 1980 Congress passed the Pacific Northwest Power Act, which authorized Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana to take steps to maintain power supplies while mitigating the impacts of hydropower on fish populations.
The act reads that “Priority shall be given first to conservation; second to renewable resources; third to generating resources utilizing waste heat or generating resources of high fuel conversion efficiency; and fourth to all other resources.” The Eugene Water and Electric Board has integrated this list of priorities deep into its strategic planning and uses them to guide its infrastructure, investment, and marketing efforts.
As a result, the bulk of Eugene’s electricity comes from hydropower, about 7 percent from nuclear power and only about 5 percent from the Bonneville Power Association’s natural gas and coal-fired resources. In order to decrease even this small percentage of electricity use that results directly in greenhouse gas emissions, EWEB’s objectives over the coming years include substantial increases in wind and solar thermal power.
But the quest for developing new, even renewable, sources of electricity can be seen as dubious wisdom. Yes, we have to find better ways to support our convenient and modern lifestyle, but making more electricity from alternate sources may lead to unforeseen consequences. In the 1930s, hydropower was seen as the ecological and renewable solution for our country’s power needs, but now these dams across our land are at the center of serious environmental debates.
The best solution, the retro ’80s idea, one with not nearly the flash and marketing pizzazz of “sustainability,” is still conservation. As the entity that harvests and distributes our shocking fuel for modernity, we should be thankful for a power board that remembers the one good idea from the 1980s. In our drive to make cleaner, faster energy more sustainable, we forget that conservation is the best investment for lessening our impact on our environment and ourselves.
Someone once said that the cleanest energy is the energy you never use. So, back here in our fully-electrified lifestyle, at the same time that you make decisions to try and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and create sustainability, figure in the basics and remember to find ways to use less electricity in the first place.
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