Republican leadership at the state Legislature wants Utah to be self-sustaining when it comes to energy production.
Before the 2024 General Session even started, Speaker of the House Mike Schultz pledged to not let Utah become a place where people “have to turn your thermostat to 80 degrees during the summer because there's not enough power.”
“I don't want to rely on other parts of the world or other states to provide the energy for our citizens,” he said. “We need to be self-sustaining, especially in the world that we're living in.”
Blackouts and electrical grid issues in states like California and Texas are reasons why Schultz and Senate President Stuart Adams say it’s in Utah’s best interest to become energy independent.
“Let me be clear,” Adams told his Senate colleagues on the opening day of the 2024 General Session, “we will not pay for the mistakes of other states and we will not stand by and pay the price or suffer the consequences of their poor policy decisions.”
But what that means in practice is another question.
“Energy independence means a lot of different things to a lot of different people,” said University of Wyoming economics professor Rob Godby. “When you start talking about states being energy independent, of course it's possible. But the question is, at what cost?”
The issue, said Godby, is how the energy market is set up. Free trade allows wind power generated in Oregon or Washington to be transmitted to Utah. The same goes for Utah power, it often goes to out of state consumers if the price is right. Put simply, the market decides the flow of energy, not lawmakers.
Unwinding that complex market will be the challenge, especially for Utah’s largest utility company, Rocky Mountain Power, and its parent company, Oregon-based PacifiCorp.
“The Rocky Mountain Power system has found the cheapest way to do [business] is to produce power in some centers and then move it to the centers that demand it,” Godby said. “The whole system is not on a state independence basis. It's really a six-state system, so it is kind of difficult to detach yourself from that system.”
Decoupling from that system and truly becoming self-sustaining as Schultz and Adams envision could cost Utah consumers in the long term.
“It's just much cheaper to import cheap energy when it's available from wherever it's available instead of using more expensive energy locally,” said Godby. “If you restrict trade, you increase costs. It's that simple, but it does make a good slogan.”
One effort to keep more power generation in Utah has already been introduced to the Legislature. The “Electrical Energy Amendments” bill would require any shuttered power plant to be replaced with another of equal capacity.
While HB191 does not specifically mention coal power, the legislation comes less than a year after Rocky Mountain Power announced early closures of two of their coal-fired plants in Emery County.
No final decisions have been made, but Rocky Mountain Power has identified the Hunter and Huntington plants as potential candidates for a transition to nuclear power in the future.
“We have to work to find what those options are,” Schultz said. “There needs to be a transition, but it's got to be a responsible transition.”
