Case For Removal Of Lower Snake Dams Grows Stronger; GOP, Farm Lobby Dig In Deeper

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The case for keeping the dams has been weakened as solar and wind energy and natural gas have supplanted hydroelectricity as the Pacific Northwest’s cheapest sources of power. That development has sent the Bonneville Power Administration, the long-tentacled federal agency that markets electricity from the Snake River dams and 27 other federally owned Columbia Basin dams, into a tailspin. Nevertheless, Bonneville and the dams’ many supporters continue to resist removal because, they say, the hydropower system and the Pacific Northwest economy are inseparable.

The lower Snake River dams have enabled large quantities of grain to be shipped by barge from Lewiston, Idaho all the way to the mouth of the Columbia River, 465 miles away, making the ninth-largest city in the nation’s 39th most populous state the West Coast’s farthest-inland port. But in the last two decades, freight volume on the Snake corridor has declined by 70 percent, as farmers have turned to rail and trucks to move their grain to the West Coast, and container shipments dropped from 18,000 a year in 2000 to zero in 2017.

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For now, the dams’ fate rests with Bonneville, which markets more than a quarter of the Pacific Northwest’s hydroelectricity and owns about three-fourths of its transmission lines⁠. Beginning in the 1940s, Bonneville’s distribution of low-cost electricity generated by the mammoth Grand Coulee and other main-stem Columbia River dams gave the Pacific Northwest a competitive advantage that stimulated its economy and seemed to signify dams’ endless bounty. Now, however, the agency faces financial collapse. As Elliott Mainzer, its administrator, stated publicly last year, Bonneville has experienced a “bloodbath.” “I’m not in a panic mode,” he said, “but I am in a very, very significant sense of urgency mode.”

The 21st century has caught up with Bonneville, as the cost of renewable energy and natural gas has dropped below the price of Bonneville’s hydroelectricity. Bonneville historically maintained low prices for its contracted customers, chiefly 134 Pacific Northwest public utility districts, by selling its surplus power at much higher rates to California. But when the state began embracing solar energy in the last decade,⁠ the going price for Bonneville’s surplus power dropped sharply⁠. As a result, Bonneville has been forced to raise rates it charges its contracted customers by about 30 percent over the last eight years. Those customers now pay Bonneville more than $35 per megawatt-hour; were it not for their contractual obligations, they could buy electricity on the open market for prices that over the last year averaged less than $30 a megawatt-hour and occasionally dropped to below zero. The public utility districts’ contracts expire in 2028, when many may opt for cheaper electricity somewhere else. Bonneville might then be forced to raise its rates even more, driving away still more customers and intensifying the “death spiral” that utilities increasingly fear.

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https://e360.yale.edu/features/on-the-northwests-snake-river-the-case-for-dam-removal-grows