Water flows through the fish ladder at the Bonneville Lock and Dam on the Columbia River Wednesday June 12, 2024. (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times, 2024)
By Isabella Breda
Seattle Times climate reporter
The Bonneville Power Administration, the regional wholesaler of federal hydropower, wants to raise its electricity rates 6.3%, which would trickle down to Northwest residents’ utility bills.
In a filing this month, Bonneville attributed the proposed increase to anticipated costs from court-ordered measures intended to help imperiled salmon in the Columbia River Basin. The measures include spilling more water over hydropower dams instead of through turbines, a practice that has long been employed to help salmon migration. Bonneville is seeking to recover $250 million through fiscal year 2028.
Last June, President Donald Trump killed a landmark agreement intended to provide a road map for the future of salmon recovery and energy supply in the Columbia Basin. The decision to pull out of the agreement with tribal nations, the states of Washington and Oregon and conservation groups restarted decades of litigation and resulted in a court this February ordering these measures intended to help salmon. Had the agreement still been in place, the rate hike wouldn’t be on the table.
Bonneville markets about one-third of the electricity generated in the Northwest, primarily from federal hydroelectric projects. It operates almost 75% of the high-voltage transmission in its service area.
Its biggest customer is the Snohomish County Public Utility District, which serves more than 880,000 residents in Snohomish County and Camano Island. Though customers would not see an immediate impact on their bills, the rate increase could impact customers in future years, said Kellie Stickney, a Snohomish County PUD spokesperson.
The utility and other entities will assess the details of the proposed rate increase and advocate for their customers, Stickney said.
Seattle City Light, which purchases about 30% of its energy from Bonneville, said the increases would not show up on utility bills in the next few years. The costs would be absorbed through the utility’s “rate stabilization account,” a cash reserve, said spokesperson Kate Jacobs.
What Northwest residents ultimately see on their electricity bills would vary by utility, but the rate hike would certainly add to the pressures utilities are feeling across the board, said Scott Simms, the CEO and executive director of the Public Power Council, which represents Northwest public utilities. “We just continue to see heightened demands and pressures on the region’s hydro system,” Simms said, describing drought and extreme weather, such as heat domes, straining the system.
The now-defunct Biden-era agreement over Columbia Basin dams provided much more advantageous hydropower operations, primarily in August when Northwest residents are running their air conditioners and river levels are lower, Simms said. The council is a defendant-intervenor in the litigation. He said he hopes these operations are a starting point for discussions outside the courtroom.
Conservation groups say Bonneville is scapegoating salmon to deflect from the agency’s poor planning in a decision that would ultimately burden the region’s ratepayers.
“It’s peculiar from a business standpoint to tease out this one factor when there are a multitude of variables that go into where Bonneville ends up at the end of the fiscal year,” said Michael Mayer, an attorney for Earthjustice, which represents energy, conservation and fishing groups in the litigation. “It’s premature to say right now that salmon are going to be this sole cause and effect. We think it’s early and it’s potentially wrong.”
Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, in a letter to a hydropower advocacy group, stated that the proposed rate increase is a “direct consequence of the Trump Administration’s failure to follow the law.”
A Bonneville spokesperson said the agency couldn’t comment due to rules prohibiting communication during the rate proceedings.
The federal hydropower system has been increasingly strained by climate change and growing energy demand, and there’s uncertainty on the horizon as proposals for electricity-hungry data centers crop up around the region. Cold snaps and heat waves have fueled peaks in demand. In January 2024, for example, a cold snap forced Bonneville to spend $300 million to buy power from outside the region.
At issue in the long-running litigation is the impending extinction of salmon, central to the health, culture and religion of tribes and Northwest economies. Climate change is turning up the heat on existing fish-passage troubles, as salmon navigate a gantlet of 325 miles of slack water, passage over or through eight dams (both ways), predators, low flows and hot water.
Four of the 16 Columbia Basin salmon and steelhead stocks that historically returned to spawn above the present-day location of Bonneville Dam, about 40 miles east of Portland, are extinct. Seven are listed as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
Of the historical populations of Snake River Basin fall Chinook, spring-summer Chinook, sockeye and steelhead, half have already been lost, Nez Perce Tribe director of biological services Jay Hesse described in a declaration.
As a snapshot, this year saw the lowest number of adult steelhead returning to the basin since the dams were built, and just eight endangered Snake River sockeye have returned to the Stanley Basin as of last week.
For more than 30 years, dam operations on the Columbia and Snake rivers have been the subject of these court battles.
After years of mediated negotiations, the federal government entered the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement in 2023 with the Nez Perce Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs, Yakama Nation, the states of Washington and Oregon and conservation groups. It was intended in part to help restore salmon runs by opening a pathway to dam removal.
The litigation resumed after Trump axed the agreement, with a federal judge this spring ordering dam operators to increase spill at eight dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers.
Conservation, energy and fishing groups represented by Earthjustice, as well as Oregon, Washington state and several tribal nations, were seeking emergency stopgaps to help the chances of salmon survival in lieu of the agreement.
The spill that was ordered is largely in line with what has been in place over the past few years, said Tom Iverson, a biologist and regional coordinator with Yakama Nation Fisheries. Iverson is among those who are skeptical of Bonneville’s math and eager to see what is presented in the rate proceedings.
Spill at moderate levels is now required through the entire month of August. That was not in place under the 2023 agreement but is not unprecedented. It was ordered in 2005 and most recently implemented in 2019 as well. A 2020 biological opinion requires spill at these levels for the first half of August.
Bonneville has previously overstated the impacts of fish on costs, said Mayer, of Earthjustice. In 2018, it claimed it needed to raise rates due to a similar court order but ended the year with a $123 million surplus.
Meanwhile, Bonneville’s revenue forecast exceeds projections by $38 million, according to Earthjustice.
Bonneville aims to wrap up the process by Dec. 18.
Seattle Times: After failed Columbia dam deal, BPA seeks electricity rate hike
