The Real Story – A Column
Think about the mighty Columbia as an Oregonian. Think of it as someone seeing it for the first time. Now an out-of-state developer wants to dredge it up. An energy player who cares not about the River but sees it as an opportunity to cash in by using it as a utility trench. Jesus- what altered evil timeline are we actually living in?
HILLSBORO — For more than sixty years, I have watched the landscape of Washington County shift from strawberry fields to silicon wafers. But what is happening right now in our hallways of power and beneath the surface of our most iconic river is something a true Oregonian would never have dreamed of. We are on the verge of sacrificing the ecological soul of the Pacific Northwest, the Columbia River , to bail out a “Data Center Gold Rush” that has officially run out of juice.
The Crisis: Hillsboro is Out of Power
As I reported in the Hillsboro Herald last week, Hillsboro has hit a thermal wall. The “North of Pearl” (NOPE) flowgate is at max capacity. We have buildings like EdgeConneX POR03 sitting structurally finished but “dead on the vine” because if PGE tries to push any more power into North Hillsboro, the lines will literally sag and fail. PGE admits it has signed contracts for 430 MW that it cannot currently deliver, with a total pipeline of 7.3 Gigawatts looming behind it. Their fix? A massive infrastructure project that won’t be ready until 2030.
Hillsboro May Be Out Of Power: The High Cost of the Data Center “Gold Rush”
The “Hail Mary” in the Riverbed
Wall Street cannot wait until 2030. To save their investments, they have proposed a radical “shortcut.” As Grant Stringer recently detailed for OregonLive, a private firm wants to dredge 100 miles of the Columbia Riverbed to lay a high-voltage cable that bypasses our land-based bottlenecks. Dredging the Columbia means resuspending legacy toxins like PCBs and heavy metals near Superfund sites. It means heating the water in a river already too warm for our struggling salmon. It means ignoring the treaty rights of the Yakama Nation and other tribes who see this for what it is: a violation of ancestral waters. I mean, who in the hell would even dare to suggest tearing up the bottom of the mighty Columbia, unless they absolutely do not care about one of the most beautiful places in the world? And you know what, that is what is wrong with this country, what is wrong with PGE and the private equity firms that now control it. They do not value us, Oregon, or anything short of their payday.
The Players: Houston, Fairfield, and BlackRock
This isn’t a “local utility” project. This is a private equity play. PowerBridge LLC : The Connecticut-based firm pushing the project is led by Alex Hernandez, a man known for bypassing the traditional grid to power data centers, according to a review of the record. He is best known for creating a massive Data Center cluster in Pennsylvania, and rather than using the electrical grid, he made a deal to plug it right into the 2.5 GW Susquehanna Nuclear Power plant. This used a ‘behind-the-meter’ strategy to bypass the traditional regional grid, proving he has a blueprint for delivering power outside of legacy utility structures. PowerBridge is a portfolio company of Five Point Infrastructure Partners, a $8 billion Houston-based private equity firm. Their business model is “Powered Land”, buying up land and securing power rights to flip to tech giants…