Each week during the 2026 legislative session, we're checking in with a Salt Lake Tribune reporter about the latest in Utah politics and what you need to know. Last week, we talked with water and land use reporter Leia Larsen about PacifiCorp's move to cut ties with Washington — and what that means for Utahns.
Tom Williams
You would think they've made this just a business decision, but it certainly has political overtones, as evidenced by legislative leaders cheering this on. So first of all, what's PacifiCorp doing here?
Leia Larsen
So just to give you a little background, PacifiCorp serves six states in the West. Three are in the Intermountain West, so that's Utah, Idaho and Wyoming, and then three are on the coast. There's Washington, Oregon and California. And between these three states, you have some pretty differing opinions when it comes to where energy should come from, greenhouse gasses, climate change, those kinds of things. So the states have sort of been squabbling over this as those coastal states adopt more liberal policies to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. And the interior states that are providing a lot of the energy to these coastal states are trying to keep their coal industries and their energy industries alive.
So the big news is that PacifiCorp announced this week that they are cutting ties with Washington, apparently. They’re going to close shop, move out and sell off all their assets in Washington State — like they have a natural gas plant there, they have some wind farms — and they are going to sell them to another company based in Oregon, Portland. General Electric Company is who they're selling it to for $1.2 billion.
Tom Williams
And how does PacifiCorp’s business in Washington compare to Utah? The percentages?
Leia Larsen
Utah is by far PacifiCorp’s biggest customer base. Here in Utah, we call it Rocky Mountain Power, but PacifiCorp is the parent company. The customer base in Washington is about 7% of who's buying electricity for them. And then in Utah, it is 46%.
Tom Williams
Legislative leaders in Utah are happy about this. Why? What are they saying?
Leia Larsen
This all goes back to politics. So we first heard lawmakers kind of referring to a divorce of the coastal states with the Intermountain states back in November 2024 when they had Rocky Mountain Power up to Capitol Hill in Utah and kind of grilled them about all these liberal policies on the West Coast that were affecting the interior states. So they had pushed Rocky Mountain Power to sort of “divorce” itself from these liberal coastal states. Kind of left the utility in a bit of a bind. But with this news that came this week, we heard some of our state leaders, including House Speaker Mike Schultz, saying that this is the first step moving toward that divorce that they were pushing for back in 2024.
Tom Williams
And Utah leaders — this quote stood out to me — they say they want Utah to be the nation's power station. They're all in on producing power.
Leia Larsen
Yeah, that's what they keep saying. You know, Gov. Spencer Cox adopted this Operation Gigawatt, where he's trying to more than double Utah's energy output in the next decade. We see Utah leaders kind of putting out the welcome mat to data centers and welcoming AI and technology if they want to bring more manufacturing back. Of course, all that gobbles a lot of power. So yes, they've been pushing.
Largely what we've been seeing has been nuclear energy; you hear a lot of talk about small modular reactors. Although Cox will call his Operation Gigawatt an all-of-the-above strategy, it seems like a lot of the talk’s about nuclear, less so about renewables, a little bit about our traditional sources, like coal and things. But definitely a big push for nuclear.
And like I mentioned earlier, these interior states like Wyoming and Utah have been net energy exporters to other states, especially those big cities on the coast. And Utah would like to maintain that position and continue to generate more power than it needs and sell it off to other states and have a robust energy industry here, so that that is what they're aiming for.
Tom Williams
Not everyone's happy with this pull out of PacifiCorp from Washington. What are the opponents saying?
Leia Larsen
I think it goes back to that whole posturing from the state that we are going to be the power station of the nation. We are going to be a net energy exporter. Well, what the customer based in the big cities is telling us, the people buying all our power that we're generating here, what they're saying is we don't want energy from fossil fuels. We don't — because nuclear, which the state is really fixated on, is at least a decade out. So in the meantime, what are we going to do? We're going to keep our coal plants running. We're building a few more natural gas plants. But natural gas is, of course, itself, a potent fossil fuel. But this customer base, in these more liberal states, they don't want energy from those sources. They want clean energy. They want renewable energy.
So a lot of the opponents of this move are looking at it as kind of short-sighted, because it doesn't align with the state's goal of being a net exporter. And also, there's some concerns that it can make our rates rise. Our electricity bills could go up here in Utah, if there's not that bigger customer base to draw from, from multiple states.
Tom Williams
Yeah, one of the people you talked to talked about a double-peaking system being an advantage. We might be heading away from that. What is that double-peaking system?
Leia Larsen
Yeah. I mean, this is kind of fascinating. So if you look at this service area that PacifiCorp up until now has provided in the Intermountain West, in Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, our electricity demand goes up in the summer. That's when we all flip on our air conditioning and are running all day. That's when we're drawing the most from the grid.
Out there in the Pacific Northwest, it's the opposite, because they mostly heat their homes in the winter using electricity. So their summers are a lot cooler than ours, so they don't flip on ACs. They don't have that surge in demand in the summer, but they do have a surge in demand in the winter.
So by having that sort of double-peaking system, you're able to justify, I guess, having all these generation stations, these big coal plants, natural gas plants, because they don't suddenly go idle in the winter when Utah doesn't need the electricity like it did in the summer. Instead, the utility can be selling it up to those Pacific Northwest states. So it kind of spreads the costs around, and by losing -- you know, 7% may not sound like a substantial amount of their customer base, but it all adds up. And you know, I hate seeing my electric bill go up. I'm sure your listeners all feel the same well.
