It’s time to buy stock in the companies that manufacture flashlights and backup generators, because residents of the West Coast will need lots of them in the not-too-distant future.

Electricity will be in short supply, as more data centers and artificial intelligence computing facilities go online, along with more bitcoin mining operations and tens of thousands of electric cars and trucks. Combined with population growth — the current population of California, Washington, Oregon is more than 51 million — the demand for electricity will increase by 20% by 2034.

At the same time, nuclear and coal-fire power plants have been decommissioned, leaving the region dependent on hydropower and natural gas.

Note that environmentalists are pushing to get rid of those two types of electrical generation and yammer about using cow manure to generate “clean” natural gas. There aren’t enough cows on the planet to supply enough manure to produce the electricity needed to power the U.S.

That leaves the entire West Coast dependent on wishful thinking.

This isn’t coffee shop chatter either. The Western Electricity Coordinating Council reports that the Northwest will have hundreds of hours of blackouts each year by 2034 unless more generators and transmission lines are constructed.

“We’re already experiencing, starting five years ago, events where we came close to power shortages or instituting a rolling blackout,” Washington Public Utility Districts Association policy director Nicolas Garcia told the Capital Press.

Governors in Washington, Oregon and California are pushing plans to build more wind and solar farms, but they will supply electricity only sporadically and require massive battery facilities and other types of storage.

The council’s job is to supply adequate amounts of electricity in the 14 Western states, two Canadian provinces and Baja California in Mexico.

Doing that will be impossible, thanks to scattered efforts to build solar and wind farms, which are among the least efficient forms of generation. Because the sun and wind can generate electricity only intermittently, they produce only about one-third of their peak capacity. That means a 1-gigawatt solar farm will produce an average of only 300-400 megawatts.

But the problem goes beyond generating enough electricity. More transmission lines will be needed. These projects can take decades to design, plan and build.

For example, the 300-mile-long Boardman, Ore., to Hemingway, Idaho, power line has been in the works since 2007. Idaho Power Co., reckons it will be in operation as early as 2027, if everything goes according to plan.

That’s a minimum of 20 years for one project.

This slow-motion development of transmission lines and a lack of addition generation is not necessarily the fault of the power utilities. The political drum beat for “clean” energy in Washington, D.C., Olympia, Salem and Sacramento has continued while little serious thought has been given to reliable ways to generate electricity and building transmission lines.

That’s why many Westerners will be left in the dark in the years ahead. Please pass the flashlights.