By 2045, state law requires all electricity sold in Washington to be carbon-free, one of the most aggressive deadlines in the country. But to meet skyrocketing electricity demand, utilities are preparing to build a fleet of power plants fueled by natural gas.
This contradiction is setting the stage for a renewed battle over Washington’s clean-energy transition.
Puget Sound Energy, the state’s largest utility, last year purchased six new gas turbines and has proposed adding 5 gigawatts more over the coming decades, enough to power Seattle's average load nearly five times over. That's on top of a plan to convert a Centralia coal plant to run on gas. Williams Companies, a major pipeline operator in the Northwest, announced plans to expand a natural gas pipeline, which could deliver more fuel to Washington.
In Olympia, utilities are making the case for a massive gas expansion, citing a study that models a doubling or more of the greater Northwest's gas capacity — at max output, enough to surpass hydropower, the region’s biggest source of electricity.
The scale of these plans has caught lawmakers off guard.
“CETA (the Clean Energy Transformation Act) was designed to transition us off fossil fuels, not to build new gas,” said state Rep. Beth Doglio, D-Olympia, who chairs the House Environment & Energy Committee.
With nearly two decades until the state's clean energy deadline, Doglio said Washington should not allow a major gas build-out yet.
“Right now is not the time to make concessions on our goals,” she said. “Now is the time to get creative and innovative.”
However, Democratic leaders are not ruling out new plants if the alternatives prove too costly or risk outages. Lawmakers are already discussing narrow changes to state law that could give gas a larger runway.
What remains to be seen is just how much gas Washington will tolerate, and whether plants built as temporary safeguards will become too expensive to abandon, locking the region into a fossil fuel burning future.
Fleet of 'spare tires'
Facing state mandates, PSE is racing to replace coal with wind and solar, but the utility says there are gaps that renewables just can't realistically fill — especially in the Northwest.
Here, just when utilities need power most — during prolonged cold snaps when everyone blasts the heat — renewables can become the least dependable. The same high-pressure systems that can bring extremely low temperatures for days can also stall winds, while short winter days limit solar generation. Local utilities have a tougher challenge than warmer states where demand peaks on hot summer days when solar is abundant.
To prevent outages on these rare days — particularly in dry winters when hydropower is scarce — PSE says it needs to build more of a certain type of gas plant called peakers," which stay dormant by default and switch on when electricity demand surges. PSE already operates three peaker plants along the Interstate 5 corridor — in Mount Vernon, Blaine and Frederickson, Pierce County — that can power hundreds of thousands of homes within minutes.
“Think of it like the spare tire in your car,” said Matt Steuerwalt, PSE’s senior vice president of external affairs.
Compared with coal, which was legally phased out last year, burning natural gas for electricity emits about half the greenhouse gases (although methane leaks add to its impact) and is allowed under state law until 2045.
Batteries charged with wind and solar energy could also theoretically carry PSE through a cold snap. But to rely entirely on them without any gas peakers, the utility says it would need an impractical amount, enough to fill 5,000 acres, a larger area than Mercer Island. And cities in the region are increasingly restricting battery facilities. On the other hand, PSE said it could provide the same backup with just 150 acres of gas peakers.
Soon, this will be a dilemma for nearly all utilities. Even those that never relied on coal will likely need a lot more power to keep up with electric vehicles, heat pumps and data centers. Electricity demand across the greater Northwest could climb 50% — or perhaps even double — by 2045 depending on how fast the region electrifies, according to a utility-funded study by energy consulting firm E3.
Supplying all that with existing clean technologies like hydro, wind, solar and lithium ion batteries "is not feasible," the study said, because it would require an "unrealistic quantity of resources. Even if the land, equipment, and transmission were available, it could nearly triple electricity rates by 2045.
Taken together, E3 suggests Washington's clean energy targets may not add up.
“It’s really unlikely that we’ll be able to be fully all-gas-free by 2045,” said Arne Olson, senior partner at E3. “There just isn’t a substitute for natural gas capacity today.”
Utilities have taken that argument — backed by E3’s study — to lawmakers: Accept a slightly-less-than-100% clean grid and build a large fleet of gas peakers that run only when renewables fall short.
E3 models a massive expansion of the region's gas-generating capacity — a doubling or more — which would likely require additional pipelines to carry the fuel in. Companies have already identified the opportunity.
Williams Companies has proposed expanding its Northwest Pipeline along the Columbia River Gorge to serve customers on the I-5 corridor in Oregon and Washington. The project would add roughly 650 million cubic feet of daily gas capacity. Williams said an initial solicitation of customer bids drew “meaningful market interest.”
Still, a major question looms over the modeled build-out: Would Washington’s clean energy law leave freshly built power plants as little more than an extremely expensive collection of metal by 2045? Or will state legislators change the law?
The legal runway for gas
PSE isn't asking for changes to the state's clean energy target, not yet anyway.
To reconcile its proposed gas build-out with the 2045 deadline, PSE says it could convert its plants to run on renewable fuels like hydrogen or biodiesel or capture the carbon emitted from gas turbines before they enter the atmosphere.
But none are available today at the scale and cost utilities need.
Climate advocates worry that PSE will build gas plants under the promise of turning them clean, only to later say they can’t, and use the massive investment and the cost of pivoting away as a way to corner lawmakers into loosening climate rules.
Others in the energy sector are urging lawmakers to lower the target now, saying utilities need a more realistic standard so they can confidently invest in the resources needed to keep the lights on in the future.
“We shouldn’t let the branding of 100% get in the way,” said Kurt Miller, executive director of the Northwest Public Power Association, a trade association representing public utilities. “If we could get to 90% carbon-free, that would be a tremendous example to the rest of the country and to the rest of the world.”
Democratic leaders are not ready to rewrite their targets in such a dramatic way, but concerns about affordability and outages have prompted them to consider smaller changes that could widen the pathway for a fossil fuel build-out.
Washington’s Clean Energy Transformation Act already has two major exemptions that can be triggered if complying with the law would threaten power reliability or push costs past a set threshold — risks utilities say would arise without new gas.
It’s a promising sign for utilities that at least one state regulator appears amenable to a gas expansion. Ann Rendahl, a member of the state's Utilities and Transportation Commission, said in an October energy conference that the state needs to build more clean energy, transmission lines and gas pipelines.
“I’m not saying it’s all gas,” Rendahl said in an interview. “What I’m saying is it’s an option we can’t just stop right now, because it’s about reliability and safety for people.”
House Majority Leader Joe Fitzgibbon, D-West Seattle, said new gas plants should be a last resort. However, Fitzgibbon and Doglio said they were open to making CETA’s protection against steep rate increases more meaningful. Fitzgibbon also said lawmakers could consider limited flexibility to burn fossil fuels past deadlines during severe droughts, heat waves or other emergencies. Both were willing to discuss carbon capture for gas plants.
Still, any new gas, Fitzgibbon said, should be allowed only “in the narrowest possible way over the tightest possible timeline.”
Gov. Bob Ferguson declined to take a position on the proposed gas build-out, citing his possible role in reviewing it. Instead, he emphasized faster clean-energy permitting and transmission, citing two executive orders and the new Washington Electric Transmission Authority.
Buying time
Even if wind, solar and existing batteries can’t meet the moment, climate advocates say Washington can buy time for cleaner solutions to arrive.
Fusion power, small modular nuclear reactors, advanced geothermal and iron-based batteries could eventually fill the gaps left by wind and solar. Long-duration batteries may arrive as soon as the early 2030s according to some forecasts, and state utility regulators have urged PSE to account for emerging technologies that could reduce its need for gas plants.
“I think it’s coming,” said Matt Steuerwalt of PSE. “But none of them are here today.”
In the meantime, advocates want utilities to do more to curb demand. A study by energy consulting firm Sylvan Energy Analytics found that requiring large new data centers to cut their power use during extreme winter weather could significantly reduce — and in some scenarios eliminate — the Northwest’s power gap at least through 2030, provided that planned clean energy resources meet their construction timelines.
“We can’t control the wind (or the economy), but we have some tethers on the demand side that could buy the region some time,” the study’s authors wrote.
A bill that would have required data centers to reduce demand during emergencies died in Washington’s last legislative session after opposition from Microsoft and Amazon, but lawmakers say the issue will return.
Laura Feinstein, a fellow at sustainability think tank Sightline Institute, said some voluntary programs that pay customers to use less power during peak periods — like overnight EV charging — should become mandatory.
“I’m not going to be so naive as to say that there won’t be political costs,” Feinstein said. “But the reality is that our status quo is sending us into a situation that’s unsustainable.”
As utilities work to guard against electricity shortfalls, thousands of people in Washington lost power this month due to wildfires stoked by a warming environment.
That's important to remember as utilities push for more gas, said KC Golden, who represents Washington on the Northwest Power and Conservation Council. Most power failures are caused not by electricity shortages, he said, but by extreme weather — threats worsened by burning fossil fuels.
© 2026 The Seattle Times. Visit www.seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
