Note to readers •This story is made possible through a partnership between The Salt Lake Tribune and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
PacifiCorp, parent company of Utah’s largest electricity provider Rocky Mountain Power, is closing shop in Washington state.
The utility announced Tuesday that it will sell off its wind farms, natural gas plants and power infrastructure in Washington to Portland General Electric for $1.9 billion. PacifiCorp operates in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming and small parts of California, but its biggest customer base by far is in Utah.
Utah’s legislative leadership praised the Washington sale as a win for states with more conservative energy policies.
“Based on diverging political views,” said Sen. Scott Sandall, R-Tremonton, at Utah’s Capitol Tuesday, “this is a really good thing for the state of Utah.”
Renewable energy advocates, though, say the move may backfire for local ratepayers.
Washington priorities, like its Climate Commitment Act, significantly capped the amount of energy the state can use from sources that produce greenhouse gases.
Washington has also rejected energy purchases from coal-fired power plants as of Jan. 1, and Oregon is set to do the same by 2030. California’s own fossil fuel and emissions policy prompted the Intermountain Power Plant to convert much of its generation to natural gas, which went online late last year. Utah is currently exploring ways to keep the plant’s two remaining coal units operational.
Sandall and other state leaders said they were hoping Rocky Mountain Power would divest from its more liberal customer bases.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, left, and Senate President J. Stuart Adams, R-Layton, listen as Gov. Spencer Cox delivers his State of the State address at the Utah Capitol in Salt Lake City on Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026.
“We want a divorce from the three states that don’t look like Utah,” said House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, repeating a talking point that emerged in 2024. “This is the first step forward.”
The competing policies have created tension for PacifiCorp, as states disagree over who will absorb shifting costs across the company’s service area.
“This will improve the company’s financial stability while simplifying our operations to support our long-term commitment to customers in each of our remaining states,” PacifiCorp CEO Darin Carroll said in a statement.
Unlike many communities across the U.S., Utah has embraced artificial intelligence and the massive energy-hungry data centers needed to support it. The Beehive State is also looking to dramatically transform its energy generation and transmission system through Gov. Spencer Cox’s “Operation Gigawatt,” a plan to double the state’s energy output over the next decade.
“Utah’s on track to be the energy capital of the world,” said Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton. “Rocky Mountain [Power] sees the future of energy, and that future’s in Utah.”
Like many interior states in the West, Utah has long been a net exporter of energy, selling to consumers in dense population centers along the Pacific Coast. Cox and other politicians have asserted they want to expand Utah’s role as the nation’s power station, using nuclear to meet surging demand.
But the nuclear industry will likely take at least a decade to produce commercial power in the Intermountain West, leaving the region’s electricity customers largely dependent on fossil fuels, like natural gas and coal, in the meantime.
Logan Mitchell, an energy analyst with Utah Clean Energy, said celebrating Washington’s removal from the PacifiCorp grid doesn’t align with the Utah’s stated priorities.
“Our customers who are importing our energy say they want clean energy,“ Mitchell said. ”Utah wants to be an energy exporter, but if we can’t figure out how to provide what our customers want, we’re not going to be able to sell energy to them."
Both Utah leadership and PacifiCorp contend that cutting off Washington won’t impact other electricity customers in the system. But Mitchell has his doubts.
“I would be surprised if this does not impact rates,” he said.
One reason PacifiCorp has been able to keep electricity prices low, Mitchell said, is because the Pacific Northwest has peak energy demand in the winter, since residents there mostly use electricity for heating. Utah and the rest of the Intermountain West’s demand peaks in the summer, however, as they switch on air-conditioning units.
“A double-peaking system means we can pool those costs together,” Mitchell said.
But losing a significant customer base in the Pacific Northwest means generating plants may sit idle in the winter, and the cost of maintaining those stations gets shifted to other customers.
“Maybe they’ll try to conceal it for the first year, maybe it won’t be visible [on electricity bills] initially,” Mitchel said. “But long term, there’s fewer people helping pay for our peak in the summer.”
Utah accounted for 46% of PacifiCorp’s retail sales in 2024, and Washington accounted for 7%, according to a spokesperson for the utility. The sale of Washington’s assets to Portland General Electric will take up to a year to finalize.
Salt Lake Tribune reporters Emily Anderson Stern and Robert Gehrke contributed to this report.