On February 17, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek released a video assuring Oregonians that Donald Trump would not derail the progressive state’s efforts to combat climate change. As promised during his presidential campaign, Trump had issued executive orders during his first week in office aimed at halting new sources of wind power and freezing Biden-era funding for renewable energy. Oregon, Kotek said, had been “leading the way for years on courageous state policies to fight climate change.” Along with neighboring Washington state, Oregon has set an ambitious mandate for electric utilities to be carbon neutral within the next two decades. “It’s going to take all of us working together finding innovative solutions, no matter the obstacles, to confront the climate crisis,” the governor said, “and we are not turning back.” But the reality is not nearly as inspiring as Kotek made it sound. For all their progressive claims, Oregon and Washington trail nearly all other states in adding new sources of renewable energy. Iowa, a Republican-led state with roughly the same population and usable volume of wind as Oregon, has built enough wind farms to generate three times as much wind power. What’s held the Northwest back is a bottleneck Oregon and Washington leaders paid little attention to when they set out to go 100% green, an investigation by ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting found: The region lacks the wiring to deliver new sources of renewable energy to people’s homes, and little has been done to change that. Northwest leaders left it to a federal agency known as the Bonneville Power Administration to arrange badly needed upgrades to an electrical grid that’s nearly a century old in places. Bonneville, under a setup that is unique to the Northwest, owns most of the power lines needed to carry green power from the region’s sunny and windy high desert to its major population centers. Bonneville has no state or local representation within its federally appointed bureaucracy and, by statute, operates as a self-funded business. The agency decides which energy projects can hook up based on whether its infrastructure can handle the extra load, and it decides how quickly that infrastructure gets expanded. Its glacial pace has delayed wind and solar projects under Democratic and Republican presidents alike. Of the 469 large renewable projects that applied to connect to Bonneville’s grid since 2015, only one has reached approval. Those are longer odds than in any other region of the country, the news organizations found. No major grid operator is as stingy as Bonneville in its approach to financing new transmission lines and substations needed to grow the power supply, according to industry groups that represent power producers. Efforts to bypass Bonneville didn’t start until this year, when Oregon and Washington legislators considered bills to create their own state bonding authorities for upgrading the region’s high-voltage network. Both bills died. The grid’s severe constraints are hindering the Northwest at a time when it desperately needs more electricity. Oregon and Washington lawmakers lured power-guzzling data centers with tax breaks in recent years, and the industry has helped drive electricity demand sky high. Having failed to add enough green-energy sources or any new gas-fired power, the Northwest buys electricity from elsewhere, at high prices, during extreme weather. Rates paid by customers of major Oregon utilities are now 50% higher than five years ago. The worsening energy shortage threatens millions of residents with continual rate hikes and sporadic power outages—not to mention dashing the Northwest’s hopes of drastically reducing its contribution to climate change. “The people who, technically speaking, are in charge of our transmission system are dropping the ball,” said Oregon state Rep. Mark Gamba, a Democrat who sponsored this year’s failed legislation aimed at creating a state grid improvement authority. “We are absolutely looking at rolling blackouts, and we are absolutely looking at not hitting any of our climate targets when it comes to energy production.” Kotek declined an interview request. Kotek spokesperson Anca Matica said in a statement that the governor is “open to innovative ideas to increase transmission capacity” and labeled it key to achieving the state’s energy goals. She offered no direct response to questions about Oregon’s lack of progress in boosting renewables. Reuven Carlyle, the former state senator who crafted Washington’s 2019 decarbonization bill, said he was “deeply cognizant” of the region’s transmission challenges at the time but that plans to address the problem “simply slipped.” “It’s certainly nothing to be proud of that it didn’t get resolved,” said Carlyle, who founded a consulting firm for climate-focused investments after leaving the Legislature. “And it’s embarrassing that Oregon and Washington, which are such goo