WA exceeds climate targets for crypto and data centers as OR effort fails – Oregon Capital Chronicle

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Proposals from Oregon and Washington to regulate carbon emissions related to crypto mining and data centers took opposite paths in the 2023 legislative session.

In Washington, House Bill 1416 passed through the House and Senate with relative ease and was signed by Governor Jay Inslee earlier this month. The new law requires customers in rural utility districts to reduce emissions from any electricity they purchase in the market, in accordance with timelines approved in the state’s Clean Energy Transformation Act.

In Oregon, meanwhile, House Bill 2816 died in March. The bill sought to impose the emissions reduction deadlines set out in Oregon’s 2021 climate law on crypto miners and data centers. Much of the opposition came from areas with established data centers and crypto operations.

Crypto-mining operations and data centers use huge amounts of electricity. Crypto mining has also come under scrutiny for cases where miners released heated water into lakes after it was circulated through server farms, raising concerns about fish kills and algal blooms, and how, in some cases, the demands of crypto prompted closed coal-fired power plants to reopen.

Oregon State Representative Pam Marsh of D-Southern Jackson County, who sponsored the bill, said Amazon, which operates multiple data centers in eastern Oregon , lobbied against the bill and organized opposition within the community. She said she also faced misconceptions about the proposal, including fears it was the first step down a slippery slope towards regulating a class of utilities specifically exempt from the legislation. on the climate. Her attempts to address the concerns of opponents, she said, did not change the response to the bill.

We exposed the problem, Marsh said. Rather than push what was going to be a very controversial conversation, we decided to band together, come back and talk about it.

The two invoices were not exactly identical. Washington’s 2018 law to phase out non-renewable energy use, the Clean Energy Transformation Act, already applied to consumer-owned rural utilities as well as large utilities. Rep. Beth Doglio, D-Olympia, who sponsored House Bill 1416, wanted to fill a loophole that some crypto mining operations could exploit, allowing them to buy electricity in the market from unseen sources. renewables if the local hydroelectric utility cannot meet their demand.

But there was another difference: In Washington, the legislation didn’t impact Amazon’s data centers, since the electric utilities the company relies on are already subject to emissions regulations under state clean energy laws.

I’m just glad we did it this year, considering what happened in Oregon,” Doglio said.

New regulatory territory

Although crypto mining and data centers have been criticized over the past decade for their high energy consumption, they have been subject to few climate-related regulations in Oregon or Washington.

Instead, many companies, including Apple, Microsoft and the next generation of crypto miners, have set their own climate targets to be carbon negative by a certain year.

Amazon, for example, said on April 4 that it had reached a new agreement with electricity cooperative Umatilla that will increase its purchases of renewable energy. Amazon said its data centers in Oregon are already 95% powered by renewable energy and will reach 100% by 2025.

Umatilla Electric Cooperative is the utility that serves Amazon’s facilities in eastern Oregon. It is consumer-owned, one of the smaller electric utilities that were exempted from Oregon’s emissions standards in the 2019 climate law. They depend largely on hydroelectric power from the Bonneville Power Administration, but the Oregonian/Oregonlive reported that Umatilla Electric Cooperative’s carbon emissions per megawatt hour increased 543% from 2010 to 2020, a decade in which Amazon built four facilities that use enough energy. to serve 200,000 homes. The increase in emissions, the report said, was linked to utility purchases of electricity in the market, often from coal-fired sources.

That’s what spurred it, Marsh said. Because the energy they bring was dirty energy. (Utilities) really need these data centers to take some of the responsibility for their power generation, or they’re going to drift further and further away from their (hydro) allocation.

Marshs’ bill would have required all future Oregon data centers and large-scale crypto miners to power their facilities with 80% clean energy by 2030 and 100% by 2040. is consistent with timelines that investor-owned utilities are already subject to.

An Amazon spokesperson said the company opposes the Marshs bill because it does not address building the electrical infrastructure needed to bring more clean power to the grid.

Marsh said she disagreed.

It’s goal setting that drives the infrastructure and investment that gets to this point, she said.

But residents who opposed the legislation said it unfairly targeted industries important to their communities.

Paul Anderes, Union County Commissioner and President of the Eastern Oregon Counties Association, said in written testimony that the bill would threaten the ability of our member counties () to take advantage of our unique geography and proximity to renewable energy and eliminate one of the few jobs-growth and community development opportunities we desperately need.

Plan for the future

In Washington, the bill that state energy officials have introduced to effectively address the same potential problem has found a friendlier audience.

Glenn Blackmon, head of energy policy for the Washington Office of Energy, said he believed the fact that consumer-owned utilities were already included in the Clean Energy Transformation Act was the main reason for the differential treatment.

In Washington, the goal was to hold a non-residential industrial customer to the same standards as the rest of the community, Blackmon said. We wanted to make sure that if any of these operations circumvent their usefulness (to buy electricity from the market), they cannot do so for reasons of circumventing clean electricity requirements.

Back in Oregon, Marsh said she was still unclear on how best to tackle carbon emissions from the tech industry. But she said she hoped the bill would go further if she brought a version back in a future session.

It really got us thinking about how important (data centers and crypto miners) are joining us in our clean energy goals, Marsh said. And the second conversation we want to have is how do we support (rural utilities) as we move into the future of clean energy, so that as their demand grows, they can still provide good energy to their communities.

InvestigateWest (invw.org) is an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. Contact journalist Kaylee Tornay at [email protected].

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