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The utility is considering a pilot project that would — at times of peak demand — recruit a gas-powered turbine owned by the University of Oregon to add power to the system. But critics say its reliance on fossil fuels is counterproductive.
In the next cold snap, people trying to stay warm at home could suddenly lose both heat and lights. Power in one neighborhood may stay off for an hour or two before flickering back on, while another neighborhood goes dark.
It’s known as a rolling blackout, a controlled power shutoff utilities use to prevent a broader system failure on a strained regional system. The Eugene Water & Electric Board has warned customers that these rotating disconnections could occur as soon as this winter.
Nearly 80% of EWEB’s power comes from the Bonneville Power Administration, where 31 dams on the Columbia River and its tributaries generate electricity from flowing water. But ongoing drought and reduced precipitation have lowered water levels and reduced generating capacity at the dams.
At the same time, demand for electricity continues to grow.
At its core, the challenge comes down to economics 101: supply and demand. But analysts often describe a situation like this as a “wicked problem,” one without a simple solution and full of benefits and drawbacks involving budgets and pollution.
In this particular problem, the debate among energy leaders is about tradeoffs surrounding a gas-powered generator on the University of Oregon campus.
EWEB plans to buy energy from UO, which will run the turbine as part of the utility’s two-month pilot project aimed at preventing blackouts for its customers.
The utility and the university say the plan is a cost-effective way to use an available local resource to support the community during periods of high demand.
But several environmental groups and an EWEB commissioner say the move represents a step backward in long-overdue progress for clean energy, which doesn’t rely on burning fossil fuels like gas.
They also worry that the pilot project was developed without customer input and could put the health of nearby residents at risk.
EWEB looks to fill a ‘substantial hole’
The University of Oregon’s Central Power Station on Franklin Boulevard supplies energy across a campus the size of a small city.
It uses a mix of equipment and technologies to heat, cool and power buildings, including a gas-powered generator that operates much like a jet engine, spinning a turbine to produce electricity.
Built in 2011, the generator has remained largely idle, serving as a backup to keep critical systems — such as data centers and research equipment — running during power outages on campus.
Now, EWEB wants to use the University of Oregon’s generator during times of city outages to help meet household demand while keeping hospitals and other essential services operating.
According to calculations from EWEB Chief Energy Resources Officer Brian Booth’s team, the generator:
- Has the capacity to produce nearly 10 megawatts of electricity. That’s power that the utility can buy from the university to supply about 2,000 homes during extreme temperatures.
- Would help address a portion of a regional power gap that could reach as much as 9 gigawatts across the Northwest by 2030 — roughly equivalent to the electricity demand of an entire state, according to a recent study by an environmental consulting firm.
“It’s a very substantial hole,” Booth said. “It doesn’t feel that hard to imagine for us, in practice, that it would look like rolling blackouts — the first time the Northwest has ever experienced those. From our standpoint, this is a substantial piece of local generation that can be very helpful at keeping the lights on for Eugene residents.”
The generator burns natural gas, which produces carbon emissions, the heat-trapping gases that contribute to climate-altering pollution.
But UO Office of Sustainability Director, and director of the UO plant Utilities and Energy, Steve Mital said the generator has features that make it less polluting than some alternatives. The turbine captures heat that would otherwise be released into the air, he said, using it to produce steam that heats the campus and, if needed, produce electricity for EWEB’s supply.
“Any gas-fired power plant is going to have an enormous amount of waste heat,” Mital said. “The difference between ours and most [plants], they just, they just wasted it. They just send it right out into the atmosphere, and we capture it, and use it.”
The turbine is a standalone piece of equipment within the plant. Separate from it, the facility operates a set of boilers that run continuously to heat and power the campus. And should the turbine run, the set of boilers can be turned off.
If the generator were operated at full capacity to help power Eugene during periods of high demand, it would produce about 65% more carbon emissions than typical operations while it is running, likely for one to two weeks at a time.
Mital said that the generator could displace older, less efficient gas-fired plants elsewhere on the grid — ultimately balancing out, or even reducing, carbon emissions across the region.
He said that, like cars, power plants are trying to reach the same destination, and fuel will be used either way — the difference is how efficiently an engine uses it.
“Think of this [generator] as a modern hybrid, high-performing engine, as compared to what’s mostly out there; most [plants] out there were built in the ’80s or ’90s, before a lot of modern equipment became relatively available, before people were really concerned about efficiency.”
‘Ignored’ concerns
EWEB Commissioner Tim Morris, speaking on his own behalf and not for the five-member board that governs the utility, does not think of the generator as a high-performing engine. Neither do environmental policy advocates and attorneys with national and local groups, including the Sierra Club, Breach Collective, Beyond Toxics, Fossil Free Eugene and the University of Oregon Climate Justice League.
They argue the emissions logic behind the pilot project is flawed, particularly because it would introduce additional fossil fuel emissions into a densely populated part of the city. Their concerns include:
- The release of harmful air pollutants in addition to carbon emissions, for instance benzene, which is linked to asthma and other respiratory health problems.
- The lack of public notice or opportunity for comment, especially in a city where local code calls for reducing fossil fuel use, including natural gas, by 2030.
“It is critical that any decisions to increase fossil fuel use in our community should be openly acknowledged, allowed for discussion, and very closely scrutinized,” Morris, the EWEB commissioner, wrote to Lookout Eugene-Springfield in an email.
Morris also said it was unclear there was immediate need for the pilot project as the utility has long-term planning underway to meet both goals in decarbonization and customer demand.
That is also a sticking point for Dylan Plummer, a UO graduate who is now deputy director of a national clean heat campaign for the Sierra Club. Both Morris and Plummer question the timing of the pilot project, which comes after recent recommendations to update the university’s climate action plan. That plan dates back to 2007 and is an effort to voluntarily reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The university task force grew out of years of calls from students for the university — the largest single source of annual emissions in Eugene — to reduce its carbon footprint.
That effort led to an extensive study and recommendations to replace gas-fired boilers with systems powered by high-voltage electricity.
According to a university timeline, discussions of decarbonizing the plant have stalled after the recommendations reached the UO Board of Trustees in 2024.
“This has been close to 10 years of advocacy from student and community groups trying to hold the university accountable to its publicly stated climate goals,” Plummer said. “We’ve largely felt that the University of Oregon has ignored this advocacy and ignored the very real impact that its use of boilers has had on our climate and our community’s public health.”
Next steps
There is no set date for EWEB to officially launch the pilot project. Utility officials say it will depend on dire weather conditions, energy availability and demand at the time. But if the turbine is turned on for EWEB, it would happen before February, according to its contract with the university.
Meanwhile, environmentalists continue pushing for cleaner alternatives, including the recommendations made by the university’s task force, as part of a longer-term transition to meet energy demand without fossil fuels, under the local and statewide goals.
This story was updated to reflect Mital’s full job title and clarify details about how the turbine and boilers function in the plant.