The Northwest Power and Conservation Council has provided more details regarding how its ninth power plan will consider new federal policies that could affect the buildout of new resources and transmission.

The council will consider two priority scenarios to build the plan’s model, including a changing hydro operations scenario and a new resource and transmission risk scenario, the latter of which was discussed during the Sept. 9 meeting.

“This is exploring a range of uncertainty or risk … related to the region’s ability to build new resources and transmission,” Jennifer Light, director of power planning at NWPCC, said during the meeting.

The resource and transmission risk scenario includes six sensitivities:

• • Constrained new resources.
  • Changing transmission availability.
  • Changing technology costs.
  • Limited short-duration storage availability.
  • Slower demand-side resource availability.
  • Evolving federal policy landscape.

These sensitivities are intended to help the council get a better understanding of the availability of resources under certain circumstances.

When council staff first started developing the sensitivities at the beginning of 2025, President Donald Trump had yet to target tax incentives for renewables under the Inflation Reduction Act. (See NWPCC Considers Trump, Data Centers in Regional Power Plan.)

Council staff anticipate the administration will remove amendments to the Clean Air Act that imposed stricter requirements on the buildout of new natural gas resources.

Five of the sensitivities originally were modeled with the tax credits and gas requirements in mind, and the evolving federal landscape scenario considered what would happen if those were removed.

“Well, now we’re flipping that around a bit,” Light said.

Since those clean energy incentives and gas requirements no longer are relevant, council staff have removed them from the bulk of their modeling. Instead, those are tacked on to the federal landscape scenario, which assumes the credits will return in 2030, Light explained.

“Why are we proposing doing that? Well, the IRA gives us a set of assumptions we can use,” Light said. “We’ve already started using them. So, it wouldn’t make sense to come up with different tax credits now, and I think that’d just be a lot of work and a lot of guessing, not necessarily getting us any more precise than using IRA assumptions that they come back.”

The council is required under the Northwest Power Act “to develop a plan to ensure an adequate, efficient, economical and reliable power supply for the region,” according to its website. NWPCC publishes a plan every five years, and the goal is to have a draft ninth power plan done by July 2026 and a final version by the end of that year. (See NWPCC’s Initial Demand Forecast Sees Sharp Growth for Northwest.)

“If there is another administration down the road that wants to bring stuff in, it’s not necessarily going to look identical to the Inflation Reduction Act,” Light said. “But it is a set of policies that we have that we can use as a basis for assumptions that feels just as good as making a guess. And I think it will give us directionally useful information.”