On an Atlantic Island, at last they could hear bird songs.
In Idaho, closing coal plants means lower rates.
Block Island, a beloved summer destination off the coast of Rhode Island that’s home to about a thousand year-round residents, is known for unspoiled beaches, dramatic bluffs and charming Victorian inns.
And, more recently, for the nation’s first commercial offshore wind farm.
The turbines started delivering electricity in 2016, the year Donald J. Trump was first elected president. Since his re-election, offshore wind has come under siege in the United States. The Trump administration has attacked several projects under construction, including one that’s almost completed off the coast of Rhode Island, saying wind farms have no place in American waters.
But the Block Islanders have a different story to tell. Wind power has changed their lives in welcome and sometimes surprising ways.
“The benefits have been extraordinary,” said Keith Stover, head of the island’s Town Council.
Before the five turbines started spinning a few miles off the coast, this island ran on five big generators. Soot-spewing and earsplitting, the machines burned a million gallons of diesel a year, ferried in from the mainland on tanker trucks and stored underground. Energy costs, tied to the volatile oil market, seesawed so much that local businesses struggled to manage their budgets, residents said. Power surges and dips fried household appliances. Clocks wouldn’t keep time. Those who lived near the power company described scraping soot off their windows and having to wash their curtains every month.
Then, at 5:30 a.m. on May 1, 2017, with the offshore turbines up and running, the island’s utility company turned off the generators. As the motors whirred down, a new sound could be heard, bright and strangely loud in the sudden quiet: birdsong.
“I still get chills when I think about it,” said Barbara MacMullan, a resident of 30 years who heads the board of the local nonprofit power company.
Thanks to the wind farm, which was initiated by the state and developed to demonstrate the feasibility of such projects, Block Island is now connected to the mainland grid by a $120 million undersea cable. The diesel generators sit silent, kept only for emergency use.
In a big step forward for the island, the cable also delivers broadband internet. Before the wind farm, internet service was so glacial that locals would sometimes travel by boat to the mainland just for a reliable connection. The school barely had the bandwidth to participate in state testing. Now local residents can stream the shows that everyone on the mainland is talking about. People with vacation homes and the friends and family of all residents can visit longer because they can work remotely.
Something unusual is happening in Oregon: A utility is requesting to cut electricity rates.
In an October 9 filing, Idaho Power Company asked Oregon state regulators to slash electricity prices by nearly 1% for ratepayers across the board.
The company told the Oregon Public Utility Commission that the closure of the second unit at the North Valmy Generating Station, a 522-megawatt coal plant in northern Nevada, had removed costs from its balance sheet. (While the utility primarily serves customers in Idaho, Washington, and Oregon, it was a co-owner of the Nevada plant with NV Energy and operates within the Western Power pool grid system.)
At the same time, Idaho Power said the demolition of a second, already-closed coal plant roughly two hours east of Portland had eliminated regulatory liability costs.
Combined with a recent increase in rates to recover the cost of upgrades to protect against wildfires, the utility said it needed $588,295 less in net revenue. That equated to “an overall decrease of 0.90%” in necessary rates.
Idaho Power isn’t dropping rates everywhere. Last month, the company petitioned regulators in its home state to hike rates by more than $250 per year to help offset the costs of expanding infrastructure to service the fast-growing metropolis of Boise. But if the lessons in Oregon highlight anything, it’s that less coal likely means lower rates.
The move — which comes as most other U.S. utilities request record rate increases in the face of load growth that requires new infrastructure — flies in the face of the Trump administration’s push to keep the nation’s shrinking fleet of coal-fired power stations running.