Eight months after the Oregon Renewable Energy Act was signed into law, Pacific Power — the utility with the most customers in Central Oregon — is already working to meet the state’s mandate to deliver 25 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2025.

The utility, which provides power to 29 percent of the state, is building wind farms throughout the Northwest and hopes to generate 3,400 megawatts of energy by 2013.

Central Electric Cooperative, the utility with the second-most accounts in Central Oregon, is thinking about the goal, according to spokesman Alan Guggenheim, but doesn’t have any current plans to build new generating facilities. Because of its size — the utility makes up less than 1.5 percent of the state’s electric load — CEC only needs to deliver 5 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2025.

La Pine-based MidState Electric Cooperative, which serves less than 1 percent of the state’s electric load, also is mandated to deliver 5 percent renewable power by 2025.

The three utilities have different hurdles to clear, but the mandate will remake Oregon’s energy landscape.

Wind power, for instance, is likely to become a larger part of the state’s power-generation portfolio as it’s one of the more readily available forms of renewable energy and is much cheaper than power derived from photovoltaic solar sources.

How the mandate will affect electricity prices is unclear, said Guggenheim. He’s confident electricity will cost more in 2025, due to inflation and growth, but he said there are too many variables to predict how the mandate might impact consumers.

“This mandate creates a need and the marketplace, anticipating the need and wanting to make a profit, is expected to start building new, renewable power generation plants,” Guggenheim said.

“They may be solar and they may be wind, but that’s what the state had in mind.”

Representative Chuck Burley, R-Bend, believes customers will end up paying more for their energy, primarily because they will be financing the construction of new, renewable generating facilities.

“Overall, the ratepayers will end up picking up the tabs on these things,” Burley said.

Burley said he supports renewable energy, but he voted against the act because it didn’t include caps on rate increases.

Pacific Power has invested heavily in wind power. The utility operates a 140-megawatt wind farm near Dayton, Wash., a 100-megawatt wind farm near Arlington and a 41-megawatt wind farm in Carbon County, Wyo., and has plans to build three additional wind farms capable of producing 268 megawatts.

Pacific Power also purchases 155 megawatts of wind power from generation facilities in Milton-Freewater, Idaho Falls, Idaho, and Carbon County.

“Our customers want it, and we’re in the process of developing as much as we reasonably can,” said Pacific Power spokesman Tom Gauntt.

The utility offers its customers a voluntary program — called Blue Sky — that asks them to pay more for their energy in order to help subsidize renewable power generation projects. More than 20,000 Pacific Power customers in Oregon have registered with the program, according to the utility.

Pacific Power also operates in Washington state and California, and is owned by PacifiCorp, which operates as Rocky Mountain Power in Utah, Wyoming and Idaho.

PacifiCorp was acquired by MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., a Berkshire Hathaway company, in 2006.

Gauntt said the utility will submit a rate increase request to the Oregon Public Utility Commission on April 1 that takes advantage of language in the energy act that allows utilities to request rate increases to help fund renewable power projects.

Any rate increase still has to be approved by the PUC, said Gauntt. If approved, the rate will show up as a specific line item on Pacific Power customers’ bills beginning Jan. 1, 2009.

What’s renewable?

Qualifying renewable energy projects are wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, hydropower or wave energy. Nuclear power is not considered renewable.

Of these, geothermal power is the cheapest, costing between $30 and $58 per megawatt hour (MWh), according to wholesale energy price data supplied by Guggenheim. Wind power costs $60 to $69 per MWh, biomass generation costs $60 to $75 per MWh, and solar (photovoltaic) power costs $76 to $250 per MWh.

By comparison, hydroelectric power costs $25 to $27 per MHw, coal power (without carbon dioxide sequestration) costs $40 to $62 per MWh, and nuclear costs $55 to $65 per MWh.

The state mandate excludes existing hydropower from the Bonneville Power Administration, which markets the electricity produced on the federally run dams on the Columbia River as well as at the Columbia Generating Station, a nuclear power plant, in Hanford, Wash.

CEC gets virtually all of its power from the BPA. Even though it has a zero-emission portfolio, the utility has to find or create new renewable energy projects to meet the mandate’s 5 percent target.

Guggenheim said the utility is thinking about its options, some of which depend on joint projects it’s undertaken with other consumer-owned utilities in the state. CEC, for example, is one of 12 consumer-owned utilities that has partnered to build a 5.66-megawatt plant outside Corvallis that generates power by burning off methane from a landfill.

CEC doesn’t use any of the power generated by the Coffin Butte biomass project but instead sells it. According to the mandate, CEC might also be able to credit that production against the mandate target.

In addition, CEC — through its membership in PNGC Power, a Portland-based, cooperatively owned, power services business made up of 15 consumer-owned utilities in the West — is working on an experimental wave-energy plant near Reedsport that also could contribute to the utility’s mandate target in the future.

“We have lots of allies that make us optimistic we can hit these objectives,” Guggenheim said.

Guggenheim said the utility was already thinking about new power sources even before the energy act passed. Because of growth, Guggenheim said the utility is forecasting its energy demand will increase by 50 percent in the next 10 years and that it will see a 30 percent increase in customers.

“It’s not a matter of choosing renewables, it’s where are we going to get the power for the system,” Guggenheim said.