It’s now official: Utah will again host the Winter Olympic Games in February 2034.
As we look a decade into the future, it’s natural to wonder how our state will change between now and then. One area of major change—not just in Utah but worldwide—will be energy.
When Utah last hosted the Winter Olympics, in February 2002, 96% of the electricity generated in the state came from coal. Another 2% came from fossil gas, and just 2% came from renewable sources, mostly hydro and geothermal.
Twenty-two years later, the changes have been profound. By February 2024, coal’s share had dropped to just 36%, while gas had grown to 45%, and renewables to 19%. Among the renewables, the biggest share was solar power, at 14% of Utah’s total generation (even in February!).
So where will our electricity come from in another decade? A naive extrapolation of recent trends might suggest that coal will vanish from the mix entirely, while solar skyrockets and gas probably stays about the same. Indeed, last year Pacificorp (Utah’s largest electric utility, dba Rocky Mountain Power), announced plans to shut down its two big coal-fired power plants in Utah by 2032. But this year they back-pedaled on that plan, saying they want to keep running the Huntington plant through 2036 and the Hunter plant through 2042. These plants have been running less and less of the time in recent years, and it’s reasonable to hope that they’ll run still less going forward, as renewable generation increases.
Meanwhile, the medium-sized Bonanza coal plant, which provides power to Utah’s scattered municipal utilities, has also dropped plans to shut down before 2034. So at this point it sure sounds like a substantial portion of the electricity that powers the 2034 Olympics will still be coming from coal. Our state legislature has made it clear that that’s what they want.
Solar power’s share of electricity should continue rising in Utah (like just about everywhere else) for the next several years. New solar farms are currently under construction in several parts of the state, typically with battery storage to spread the energy over more hours of each day. By 2034, though, price cannibalization during sunny hours may make further solar development unprofitable. I don’t know how to guess whether solar’s share of Utah’s electricity in February 2034 will be closer to 20% or 50%.
To better understand Utah’s electricity situation, we need to remember that Utah trades electricity with neighboring states. Our largest coal-fired power plant, the Intermountain Power Project, sends most of its power to Southern California. Despite the best efforts of our legislature, I expect that facility’s coal generation to wind down as scheduled in 2025, replaced in part by a new gas-fired generation unit. Most of Utah’s solar power also goes to California. Meanwhile, although Utah doesn’t have many good wind generation sites, we do import some wind power from Wyoming and it appears that the amount will continue to increase.
A big question mark for 2034 is geothermal power. It has provided a small fraction of Utah’s electricity since the 1980s, growing slowly to reach 1.6% in February 2024. Now, however, it seems set to grow much more quickly, because Fervo Energy, a startup company that uses advanced drilling and fracking to extract heat from dry rock, has begun work on what they promise will be a 400-MW geothermal facility in the southwestern part of the state, near Utah’s older traditional geothermal plants (whose capacity totals just 84 MW). Again this power will be going to California, incentivized by that state’s mandate for round-the-clock low-carbon (so-called “clean firm”) electricity.
There are some folks who believe Fervo’s drilling technology will make geothermal electricity the Next Big Thing, cheap enough that even states like Utah without low-carbon mandates will choose to buy it. I hope they’re right, but my bet is that geothermal power will not contribute much to Utah’s electricity consumption by 2034.
Utah has no nuclear power plants, and probably won’t have any by 2034. But just over the state line in Kemmerer, Wyoming, nuclear startup company TerraPower seems to be on schedule to build a 345-MW advanced sodium-cooled nuclear plant in time for the 2034 Olympics. Pacificorp is a partner in that project, so some of the power may make its way to the Olympic venues. Meanwhile, by 2026, Pacificorp plans to convert its two coal-fired generation units at the Naughton plant in Kemmerer to burn gas instead. At the huge Jim Bridger coal plant farther east, they’ve converted two of the generation units to gas just this year, and they’re promising to install carbon capture technology on the other two units by 2028 (I’ll believe that when I see it).
In summary, I expect Utah’s electricity-related carbon emissions to be substantially lower in 2034 than they are today, and of course even farther below the embarrassing levels of 2002. There’s still time to get our electricity-related emissions down to near zero by 2034, but our elected officials have shown no interest in that goal and it won’t happen unless they have a change of heart.
On smaller scales, Utahns might still claim that Olympic venues and other individual buildings have zero carbon emissions. A building might have solar panels on the roof, or the owner might subscribe to a program that invests in enough solar or wind power to offset what the building uses. I think these efforts are helpful because they increase the pace at which renewables are deployed. In the long run, though, they contribute to power price cannibalization so they may become more of a bookkeeping gimmick—shifting blame for carbon emissions from some utility customers onto others—than an actual contribution to the total amount of solar and wind that ultimately get built in Utah. (Rooftop solar has the further benefit of reducing the amount of land used by utility-scale solar.)
Besides electricity, there will be emissions from direct burning of fossil fuels. The bulk of the carbon footprint from any Olympics is surely from burning jet fuel, and that won’t change by 2034.
What about ground transportation? Utah is ahead of the national average in its share of electric cars, although that share stood at just 0.9% (of the entire fleet, not just new sales) at the end of 2022. How far it rises by 2034 will depend mostly on national trends: probably to at least 10%, and perhaps as high as 30%?
Utah used droves of buses to carry spectators up to the mountain ski venues in 2002. I’ll be surprised if they can round up enough electric buses to make the fleet fully electric by 2034, but it seems like a worthwhile goal. Now is the time to start phasing in electric school buses and transit buses that can be repurposed for this task during the Olympics. (The greater benefit, of course, will be cleaner air for our children and the rest of us to breathe.)
Finally, there’s the fossil gas that we currently use to heat nearly all buildings in Utah. Will any of the indoor Olympic spaces be outfitted with electric heat pumps by 2034? It’s certainly a possibility. The University of Utah has already begun investing in ground-source heat pump HVAC systems, though I don’t know whether its stadium and Olympic athlete housing are among the buildings that have these systems. This technology is cost effective for any large building or campus, and Utah has plenty of folks who know how to do it.
[Revised on 26 July 2024 to add the discussion of individual venues or buildings claiming zero carbon emissions. Revised 28 July 2024 to indicate that the conversion of two generation units at the Jim Bridger plant from coal to gas has already been completed.]
