PacifiCorp, the parent company of Rocky Mountain Power, is walking back plans to grow its renewable energy portfolio, instead forecasting that coal plants without an “enforceable environmental compliance requirement” will remain online through 2045.
The projection came in March as part of PacifiCorp’s 2025 integrated resource plan, a roadmap for the utility’s electrical generation over the next two decades , by which time a handful of Western states will be nearing legislatively mandated transitions to net-zero energy.
Local politicians in Utah and Wyoming, where energy communities have built their economies around the mines and workforces that power the plants PacifiCorp may leave online, were delighted by the news. But environmental advocates in the Mountain West felt that PacifiCorp—a subsidiary of billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, which owns and operates some of the nation’s dirtiest…
