< back		 K.C. Golden, Washington State Department of Community and Economic Development

Golden recently became the assistant director of the Washington State Deparment of Community and Economic Development. He formerly was the policy director and executive director for the Northwest Conservation Act Coalition, a regional alliance of public interest groups, utilities and businesses working for a clean, affordable Northwest energy future. He was a Kennedy Fellow, obtaining a master’s in public policy, at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He has also worked at the Tennessee Valley Authority, at Harvard’s Energy and Environmental Policy Center, and as a raft and canoe guide in California and New England. He served on the Washington Energy Strategy Committee, the Energy Facility Siting Process Review Committee, the Washington State Building Code Council and the Washington Energy Options Steering Committee. He has a bachelor’s from the University of California at Berkeley.
1. What is the best thing about the recommendations? These recommendations represent a good faith (but incomplete) attempt to put together a package that can unite the region around a common strategy for managing the Columbia River System and delivering a brighter energy future. Notwithstanding the changes in the electric power system, we are still a region -- economically, hydrologically, and politically. Only by working together as a region can we seize some of our most promising opportunities and meet some of our toughest challenges. If we fail to rally around a common strategy, we stand to lose the distinct “Northwest advantage” of a biologically sound and economically productive Columbia River System. We have much more to lose together than we have to gain in opposition to each other.
2. What is the most challenging thing about the recommendations? We have not yet developed a practical, competitively neutral method for securing vital investments in energy efficiency, renewable resources, and affordable low-income services. The Steering Committee has recognized the value of these investments, but it has not provided meaningful guidance on how to secure them.

If adopted, our recommendations for power marketing, transmission, and customer choice would be secured by practical safeguards in law and contract. But our recommendations for public purposes contain no such implementation mechanism. The issue is not whether we can trust voluntary commitments; the issue is whether we have a system for public purpose investment that is appropriate and durable in a competitive environment. We don’t, and we will not reach consensus on a workable package for the region until we do.
3. Why should people care about the recommendations? Energy policy is only interesting when we get it wrong. If the lights stay on, the bills stay low, and nobody’s building power facilities nearby, only energy pros care about the details. But restructuring the power industry gives us plenty of opportunities to get it wrong -- seriously wrong.

Here’s what getting it wrong means: shifting costs of expensive power plants to household consumers; losing our low-cost hydropower to other states; dramatically increasing emissions of toxic and greenhouse gases; slashing efficiency investments that save money and prevent pollution; more frequent blackouts as maintenance budgets shrink; river operations that endanger salmon; low-income consumers going without heat.

These aren’t dire forecasts; these things are happening now. Fortunately, they are preventable. We can have a clean, fair, affordable energy system. But don’t expect it to build itself. If we want to get it right, now’s the time to speak!