From Miners to Farmers: Building the Right Things First

For two centuries, our economy has run on monetizing finite commodities. Dig it up, burn it, sell it, and make a handful of people extraordinarily rich. Renewable energy proposes something different.

miners or farmers?

For two centuries, our economy has run on monetizing finite commodities. Dig it up, burn it, sell it, and make a handful of people extraordinarily rich. Renewable energy proposes something different: we stop being miners and start being farmers. We harvest the energy that arrives on its own every day, and we keep harvesting it.

That distinction matters for Clark County specifically. Extraction economies export their wealth. Harvest economies keep it local - in construction, in maintenance, in the ratepayers who own the system. This is good for our planet and our posterity, but I want to be clear that it is also, plainly, good business.

We stop being miners and start being farmers.

the catch: Energy doesn't arrive on schedule

Here is the honest problem with wind and solar. We have to make energy available when people need it, and that is not always when it occurs. Solving that is the entire ballgame for the next ten years - and it comes down to two things: storage, and dispatchable resources we can call on at will.

Anyone who tells you we can electrify everything without solving both is selling something.

What's changed isn't the argument. What's changed is that the technology finally caught up, the costs finally fell, and the window to act finally opened. Windows close.

Pumped Storage: Elegant, proven, Century-long

From a purely technical standpoint, pumped storage is one of the most viable tools we have. The concept is almost embarrassingly simple. When there's surplus energy, you pump water uphill from a lower reservoir to an upper one. When you need the energy back, you let it flow down through a turbine.

No exotic chemistry. No degradation cycle to worry about. The investment lasts a century.

It also solves a problem most people don't know exists: on an electrical system, you cannot generate power without load to absorb it, or you burn down the system. Surplus renewable generation currently gets curtailed - turned off and wasted. Pumped storage turns that waste into a reservoir.

Goldendale: Right Topography, Wrong Process

I get asked about the Goldendale pumped storage proposal constantly, so let me be direct.

The engineering is sound. The topography is genuinely well suited. But that land - like all of the Northwest - belonged to the tribes before we appropriated it. After the travesties of the last two centuries, we have no right to build there without the consent and the participation of the people whose sacred ground it is.

That isn't a technical objection and I won't dress it up as one. It's a question of whether we've learned anything.

We'll have to find another hill. There are other hills.

We haven't earned the right to repeat that history because the physics happen to be convenient.

Geothermal is the underrated bet

If Clark PUD is going to put ratepayer dollars into an emerging dispatchable resource, recent developments in geothermal are the most promising thing on the table. It's dispatchable around the clock. It doesn't depend on weather. The new drilling techniques coming out of the oil and gas sector have changed the cost picture substantially in just a few years.

It is more viable, more affordable, and less onerous than the alternative currently getting the attention. That's where I'd put our money.

Ratepayers are entitled to hear the whole cost of a thing before they're asked to fund it.

Nuclear: Answer the waste question

I want to be precise here, because this gets caricatured.

I am not against the physics. If a nuclear proposal fully and credibly accounts for its waste, it belongs in the conversation as a dispatchable resource. My objection is narrower and, I think, harder to dismiss: the small modular reactor advocates have said essentially nothing about the waste. Not a plan, not a site, not a reprocessing commitment, not a cost.

The technologies to reprocess waste materials completely do exist. They are an expensive commitment. I suspect the silence is strategic - that a full accounting of what SMR investment would add to our already appalling nuclear legacy would show the project isn't economically viable.

Until that question is answered satisfactorily, I cannot support Clark PUD actively funding the pursuit of new nuclear. That is real ratepayer money committed to a technology whose back end nobody will describe.

Ratepayers are entitled to hear the whole cost of a thing before they're asked to fund it.

The publics, acting together, have standing to shape what the region builds and how fast.

Bigger Than Clark

These are big issues - bigger than one county. But 75 percent of Washington state is public power. That's not a small lever. It means the publics, acting together, have standing to shape what the region builds and how fast.

That's the job I'm asking for. Not to attend the meetings. To read the technical material, understand it, and use Clark's seat to push the region toward the resources that will actually keep the lights on and the rates defensible in 2040.

We have about a decade to get this right. Let's spend it building the right things.

- Gordon Matthews

Candidate for Clark PUD Commissioner · 2026

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