This safe and reliable service provides low-cost power to markets throughout the west. BPA receives no tax revenues or appropriations. Your electricity bill, not your taxes, pays BPA's costs. This financial responsibility ties BPA to the people it serves in the Northwest.
BPA sells power at cost, providing a benchmark that helps keep rates low to consumers. Low-cost, renewable Columbia River hydropower is a cornerstone of the Northwest economy. In about , the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation began an effort to restore salmon runs on the river. Their plan entailed diverting water from the Columbia to irrigators, who would then let CTUIR restore a stream flow that salmon would use.
Challenges on the power side have also roiled the waters. The agency has pivoted between managing shortages and dealing with surpluses. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the Bonneville Power Administration was in crisis. The surplus in the s resulted from the Columbia River Treaty with Canada, an arrangement that, when implemented in , gave the U. Pacific Northwest power from water stored behind three large dams in British Columbia.
The Intertie was a means to market that surplus by coordinating power resources and needs between the Northwest and Southwest. The Intertie had worked well, but by the new century it had become a costly burden. As electricity shortages in California became severe, BPA was obliged to send power south—power that the agency more and more often had to buy at extraordinarily high prices.
Meanwhile, BPA had signed long-term contracts with regional aluminum companies at cut-rate prices. During the crisis, in order to recapture some of that electricity, BPA was forced to buy back, sometimes at fifty cents a kilowatt-hour, power it had sold to Kaiser Aluminum for 2.
Spot prices for power that BPA had to pay soared even higher. Meanwhile, in addition to its operating expenses, the agency was obligated to pay off the bonds issued for the Supply System nuclear projects and to make its annual interest payment to the U.
Failure to make the Treasury debt payments would anger politicians outside the region who believed the Northwest had benefited unfairly from federal largesse. Although the crisis abated, BPA was financially strapped. Its customers faced a 46 percent rate hike, and aluminum production in the Northwest had come to a near-total halt. To improve its transmission system, BPA had to build new lines, often in the face of objections from environmentalists, and it had to wheedle financing authorizations from the federal government.
Early in the new century, the agency was the largest builder of transmission lines in the United States. At the same time, the rise of renewables—notably wind power—posed new difficulties. Balancing supply and demand, as transmission systems must do, was a tricky job as more and more supply was dependent on unpredictable winds.
In several instances, faced with a surplus, BPA opted to shut off wind turbines instead of curtailing hydro. The evolution of the Bonneville Power Administration from a triumphal achievement of the early twentieth-century public power movement to a federal bureaucracy beleaguered by pressures for privatization and public doubts is reflected to some degree in the careers of some of its most important administrators.
He became the administrator of the temporary agency that managed Bonneville Dam upon its completion in and served until illness struck in Charles Luce held the post under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and pushed the agency to expand its scope with the Pacific Intertie and by advocating for nuclear power.
Don Hodel, a Nixon appointee who served from to , steered BPA toward close involvement with the WPPSS nuclear projects while largely disregarding calls for energy conservation and renewables. He went on to hold two cabinet positions in the Reagan administration and became a leading figure in the right-wing evangelical Protestant movement. The challenges of the twenty-first century—providing reliable power, protecting fish and wildlife, and responding to global warming while maintaining financial and operational stability—have produced a somewhat chastened Bonneville Power Administration.
The agency remains large, with over fifteen thousand miles of transmission lines and nearly three thousand employees serving a regional population nearing fourteen million. Since the Reagan administration, Republican administrations have floated plans for privatizing BPA by selling off its transmission system. Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation. The nonfederal nuclear plant, Columbia Generating Station, is owned and operated by Energy Northwest, a joint operating agency of the state of Washington.
BPA provides about 28 percent of the electric power used in the Northwest and its resources — primarily hydroelectric — make BPA power nearly carbon free. BPA also operates and maintains about three-fourths of the high-voltage transmission in its service territory. BPA promotes energy efficiency, renewable resources and new technologies that improve its ability to deliver on its mission.
It also funds regional efforts to protect and rebuild fish and wildlife populations affected by hydropower development in the Columbia River Basin.
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