Consent by Threat of Blackout

How Our Utilities Use Fear to Bypass Democracy

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

The local utility for the county where I live tells us the grid is strained, and that without their tidal and solar projects, we may face blackouts. But they never asked us what kind of energy future we want. Despite being a publicly owned co-op, decisions are made behind closed doors, federal grant money is pursued without member input, and public comment is reduced to a procedural formality with federal and state agencies, long after projects are underway. This isn’t community power—it’s energy authoritarianism in co-op clothing.

If we don’t move forward with these projects, the lights might not stay on.

That’s the message our local utility keeps repeating—through newsletters, meetings, and articles. They warn of blackouts and grid instability, and tell us how important local electricity generation projects are, but leave out a crucial fact: we, the public, don’t actually have a say in these projects they claim are for our benefit.

On paper, our utility is a co-op—owned by us, the members. But that ownership is symbolic. We don’t vote on major decisions. We don’t shape grant applications. And we only get to comment when a project is already in motion, through federal agencies like FERC—not to the utility itself.

The utility applied for a federal grant to explore a tidal energy project in our waters. Did they ask the community whether we wanted this? No. Were we allowed to shape the grant application? No. But we, the “owners,” are expected to accept it—and the environmental impacts that come with it.

When our local utility moved forward with a feasibility study for the tidal energy project, they were required to publicly announce it. But rather than making that announcement accessible to the community, they buried it in the legal notices section of a paywalled online newspaper. This met the legal requirement for public notification but clearly violated the spirit of public engagement.

I filed a complaint with FERC about this lack of transparency. Not long after, the utility issued a more public-facing article about the draft license application (DLA) to FERC. But by then, the process was well underway.

In their article about the draft license application, the utility again invoked the risk of blackouts—a now-familiar tactic. Instead of treating the community as a partner in designing solutions, they used fear to justify their plan: accept the tidal project or risk going dark.

Our utility wants to install a new 2.1MW solar array installed in an area where they already have a solar project, and where the local community is resisting more solar. The utility claims this project is critical for “resilience” and preventing blackouts. But the numbers don’t add up. At full production, the array might power a few hundred homes on a sunny day. It offers no nighttime generation, little or no storage (depending on whether they add more batteries to the existing battery energy storage system), and it’s not clear if the project will have the capacity to separate the county or a neighborhood from the Pacific Northwest grid in the event of a blackout. Yet the threat of blackouts is once again deployed—not as a reality-based assessment, but as a rhetorical hammer to fast-track decisions the public never got to shape.

By my rough estimate (and I’m no expert!), powering the county where I live for just one day during a blackout would require around 75 MW of solar generation and 300 MWh of battery storage in optimal conditions*. The utility’s new 2.1 MW solar array would provide just 2.5% of that need, yet we’re told it’s a vital tool to prevent blackouts. A 2 MW tidal machine would likewise be nothing more than a blip in supplying our county’s demand. This isn’t resilience—it’s a PR gesture. We’re told to accept it, and any criticism is dismissed. The numbers tell a different story.

75 MW of solar panels would require 400 to 600 acres of land and 300 MWh of battery storage would require another 15 to 30 acres. If we factor in cloudy days, lower generation in winter, and losses for a variety of possible reasons, the actual requirements could easily be double this.

The cost for a system to power the entire county would be $150M–$250M+, and that doesn’t include cost for land, maintenance, and hardware and software control systems that manage the energy system, such as routing systems, inverters, grid voltage and frequency matching, safety controls, surge protection systems, and more. Controls can add 10-20% more to the cost of solar + battery systems. Likewise the cost for the tidal machine could reach towards $80M or more once the cost of the machine itself, installation, maintenance, refurbishing, controls, and batteries are all included.

The blackout threat isn’t because our homes use too much power, although the many mega mansions and second homes in our community certainly add significant load here in the county. It’s because of electricity-intensive industries including data centers, AI infrastructure, cryptocurrency mining, electric vehicle charging hubs and electrification of transportation (like ferries), biofuels and hydrogen, and semiconductor manufacturing. It’s about electricity-intensive industries moving to Washington State because of tax incentives and growing the demand. The demands are growing primarily because of corporate choices and state incentives, not community need.

Washington’s data center boom is no accident—it’s fueled by generous tax exemptions and proactive state-level recruitment, even as the state’s mandate for carbon-free power by 2030 remains unchanged. Regional forecasts warn that data centers alone will consume as much as 4,000 MW by 2029, threatening grid adequacy without a massive infusion of new generation, storage, and transmission. This is the real driver behind blackout risk. Tiny solar and tidal projects strapped onto feeder lines will do nothing to alleviate this risk.

Paying continual catch-up

Forecasts from both local and regional sources make one truth clear: we’ll always be playing catch-up. My county’s population has increased about 16  percent since 2010. County planning documents predict continued slow but steady growth through 2045—enough to keep utility demand ticking upward alongside seasonal and commercial load.

Across the Pacific Northwest, the situation is more urgent. Regional forecasts show annual electricity demand growing consistently at 1.8 to 3.1 percent, with potential total annual demand doubling by 2046—rising from ~22,000 average MW today to as much as 44,000 average MW. Much of this growth stems from data centers, electrification of transport/buildings, chip fabs, and infrastructure for hydrogen production.

Population-based growth—homes, local businesses, and services—accounts for roughly one-third of Washington’s electricity usage and grows slowly. Meanwhile, data centers and industrial electrification are rapidly accelerating demand, adding tens to hundreds of megawatts per year. The data-driven industrial boom has clearly become the dominant factor shaping the region’s electricity needs.

This means the utility’s claims about growth and grid risks are rooted in a structural reality—but one largely not driven by locals, and certainly not requiring 24/7 utility-led infrastructure. Instead, it’s a demand surge due to industry subsidized by the state, which the utility subsequently leverages to justify centralized solar, tidal, and battery projects—reinforcing its power and its leadership’s compensation, rather than building true community resilience.

Faced with this relentless growth, the utility is using the threat of blackouts as a blunt instrument, deploying fear to justify successive small-scale solar and tidal projects that cumulatively achieve little in real resilience. They are ignoring fundamental questions about load growth caused more by corporate development than local need.

At the same time, the executive director of the co‑op earns well over $400,000 annually, a figure that makes every new project—officially about “community energy”—doubly convenient: it bolsters the utility’s budget and sustains that high salary. With each new “resilience” project, members are reminded that without rapid compliance, we may be blacked out—an urgency that conveniently shores up the investor-like stability of the co‑op’s hierarchy and executive pay grade.

As our county’s population steadily grows alongside the Pacific Northwest’s rapidly increasing electricity demand, utilities find themselves in a perpetual race to keep the grid stable.

This structural imbalance ensures that the threat of blackouts remains a constant lever, allowing our utility to pressure the community into accepting costly projects that fall far short of meeting the county’s power needs. Meanwhile, this cycle helps justify large executive salaries and ongoing investments, creating a system where fear of outages drives acceptance rather than genuine public engagement or planning.

Most utilities, including public co-ops like my own utility, rarely engage the community early or meaningfully on whether they want centralized projects or would prefer more investment in distributed solar + battery systems for more democratic control or perhaps some means to reduce demand and eliminate the need for new projects entirely. Instead, the narrative tends to be framed around large-scale build-outs, justified by threats of blackouts, leaving limited room for public input on alternatives.

Utilities consistently promote energy “efficiency,” but almost never support actual reductions in electricity use. Their programs typically focus on adding new electric devices or replacing one electric device with another—like switching from propane heat and baseboard heaters to heat pumps or gas cars to EVs—while encouraging ongoing or even increased consumption. True degrowth strategies, like radically reducing overall demand, shifting behavior, or empowering people to live with less energy, threaten their business model. As regulated monopolies or co-ops with revenue tied to infrastructure and load growth, utilities have no financial incentive to help people genuinely use less. Instead, they repackage expansion as “clean” progress—leaving meaningful demand reduction off the table.

True resilience comes from reducing demand and shifting community behaviors toward energy conservation—not just piling on centralized infrastructure. This requires education, cultural change, and support for people to manage their own power use effectively.

Without a bottom-up approach, utilities are perpetuating dependence on a fragile grid, high costs, and projects that serve institutional interests rather than the people who actually live here and the ecosystems we rely on.

“Public power” should mean people-powered energy decisions. If the utility is going to use our name to secure federal grants, build machines in our waters, and reshape our landscape, they should do it with our voices—not just in the comment period, but from the very beginning.

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* My estimate of 75MW is based on the following calculation:

Population: ~18,000 (per census, varies seasonally)

Active meters: 10,000 (assumption based on almost 10,000 households)

Average residential usage in WA: ~900-1000 kWh/month = ~30 kWh/day

10,000 × 30 kWh = 300,000 kWh/day = 300 MWh/day

So to keep the county running for 1 day, we’d need about: ~300 MWh of electricity

Average solar output: ~4 peak sun hours/day (generous for winter)

A 1 MW solar array = ~4 MWh/day (under good conditions)

To generate 300 MWh/day → 300 ÷ 4 = 75 MW of solar

Battery storage estimate:

Full 300 MWh of storage to carry the county for 24 hours (Possibly more to account for conversion losses and peak surges)

Cost = $90M–$150M just for storage (not counting solar infrastructure)

Land use estimate:

Average utility-scale solar requires 5–10 acres per MW

75 MW × 8 acres/MW = 600 acres for the solar

Rough estimate: 1 acre per 10–20 MWh battery storage = 15-30 acres for the batteries