“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, what state imports the most electricity of all?”
“Master, the answer is California.”
The Energy Information Administration, in an April 2019 daily brief, laid out the top five U.S. importers of electricity and the top five exporters. It doesn’t appear that EIA has updated that information, but it’s unlikely that it has changed significantly since then.
The Department of Energy’s statistical agency notes, “Electricity routinely flows among the Lower 48 states and, to a lesser extent, between the United States and Canada and Mexico. From 2013 to 2017, Pennsylvania was the largest net exporter of electricity, sending an annual average of 58 million megawatthours (MWh) outside the state. California was the largest net importer, receiving an average of 89 million MWh annually.”
California has historically bought a lot of out-of-state power, particularly in the summer from Oregon-based Bonneville Power Administration’s (BPA) large federal hydropower system on the Columbia River. The power from the Army Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation federal dams flows to California over the massive California-Oregon Transmission Project, 340-miles of 500-kv AC transmission lines from southern Oregon to the Golden State.
It’s managed by the Transmission Agency of Northern California.
The electricity ties between California and Oregon are more than physical. They are also managerial. When Steve Berberich stepped down at the end of September as head of the California Independent System Operator, his replacement was Elliot Mainzer, former BPA head.
California has faced a lot of electricity challenges, including rolling blackouts during a summer drought, and a decision years ago to forego imports of coal-fired power from plants in the Rocky Mountain west. Mainzer said, “Certainly the issues inside California clearly have unique elements, but the broader challenges of climate change and resource adequacy, technology innovation and affordability … they’re shared across the broader West,” Mainzer said. “And I do think they lend themselves to more integrated market solutions where that geographic and resource diversity of the region can be leveraged in the service of reliable, effective decarbonization.”
Who’s also on the top imports list? In order: Virginia, Ohio, Maryland, Tennessee. None are even close to California’s nearly 90 million annual MWh. All have not very important reasons for their imports.
Then there are the top exporters. In order: Pennsylvania (about 59 million annual MWh), Alabama (50 million MWh), Illinois (40 million), West Virginia (40 million), and Wyoming (30 million). EIA points out that a lot of the interstate flows are a result of multistate regional wholesale markets. “These integrated market regions allow electricity to flow freely between states or parts of states within their boundaries.”
— Kennedy Maize