An electric silence

The governor’s test drives attracted quite a lot of media attention, although perhaps not as much as when Kulongoski eschewed vehicles altogether and hiked to his office last year.

Yet based on the accounts we have read it seems no one bothered to ask the governor if he knew how the electricity that propelled them had been generated.

This seems to us a significant omission considering Kulongoski’s opinion on what constitutes renewable energy.

The law requires Oregon’s largest electric utilities, by 2025, to ensure that at least 25 percent of their power is from renewable sources.

That’s a laudable goal, and a reasonable timeline.

What’s not reasonable is the Act’s fine print.

The Act prohibits utilities from counting toward the 25-percent mandate electricity produced at the Bonneville Power Administration’s dams on the Columbia River.

This is ludicrous.

Although the dams have undoubtedly contributed to the decline in salmon and steelhead runs, Kulongoski siphons off a lot of his credibility with us by contending that hydropower is not renewable and, by implication, it is not as “clean” or as “green” as, say, wind power.

But the more troubling aspect of the governor’s disdain for hydroelectric dams is that he makes it more difficult to achieve the very goal he was promoting this week: Building what he called “a consistent and reliable infrastructure so consumers can make the switch seamlessly to electric vehicles.”

That switch won’t seem seamless if producing the power that fuels electric cars emits more pollution than a gasoline engine does.

Kulongoski can rhapsodize about harnessing the sun and ocean tides, but those are expensive sources of energy. By shunning cheap hydropower the governor might prolong the predominance of “dirty” sources of electricity such as coal.

Besides their high cost, glamorous technologies such as solar and wind power consume of resources. Oregon’s energy act gives geothermal a free pass, too, but you can’t tap it heat without gouging holes in the ground.

Oregon’s existing hydropower system epitomizes renewable, green power. The governor’s argument to the contrary doesn’t hold water