By Bill Arthur and Marc Sullivan
07/19/25 

The Bonneville Power Administration, our region’s largest energy purveyor, is about to make a bad decision. It announced its intention to join an Arkansas-based energy market rather than a Western regional one, even though its own financial analysis favors the regional market.

This is wonky stuff; the latest development in the industry’s attempt to address power reliability and cost at a time of increased demand and growing climate uncertainty. But what is not wonky is that this poor decision continues a trend.

BPA, as we know too well, has a long history of making bad choices.

We’ve engaged with this agency over nearly five decades and have seen it make one misstep after another, some of which have cost Northwesterners billions of dollars and placed multiple runs of salmon and steelhead in the Columbia Basin close to extinction.

Recalling the axiom — “Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it” — we’d like to review some of the agency’s most egregious mistakes. Sadly, they remain relevant, since the agency is again on the brink of harming both electricity consumers and imperiled salmon and steelhead.

Let’s start in 1976, when the BPA administrator at the time issued a “notice of insufficiency,” an announcement that it could no longer guarantee to meet electric load growth for its public utility customers, among them the Snohomish County PUD. This set the stage for a costly plan to accelerate the development of 30 new nuclear and coal plants.

It turned out that “notice of insufficiency” was wrong. The load growth that BPA forecast failed to materialize, due to its gross underestimate of energy efficiency as a resource and demand-dampening price increases.

Then came BPA’s role in the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS) debacle; a disaster so great that WPPSS became “whoops” in the local vernacular. BPA enabled the ill-fated plan to build five nuclear plants, backstopping the financing of the plants by promising “billing credits” to WPPSS’ member public utilities.

Ultimately, only one plant was built, due to huge cost overruns and lengthy delays. Most significantly, the project resulted in a massive municipal bond default, the largest at the time in U.S. history. BPA covered much of that bond default, doubling rates to its customer utilities.

Then there was BPA’s questionable role in the creation of the 1980 Northwest Power Act. The first version, shaped largely by BPA, gave the agency considerable control over energy acquisition, keeping the states and public in an advisory-only role; it treated energy efficiency as a modest resource requiring limited investment and included no fish or wildlife requirements.

After a five-year battle over the act, Congress took a different tack: It established the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, charged with developing a 20-year Regional Energy Plan and a Fish and Wildlife Program to “protect, mitigate, and enhance fish and wildlife” harmed by Columbia Basin dams and reservoirs, mandating BPA’s compliance with both.

Unfortunately — despite the principles established in the Northwest Power Act — BPA has continued to prioritize hydropower over the needs of fish. Today, we’re seeing the consequences. BPA’s fish and wildlife program has cost more than $25 billion, yet 13 threatened or endangered salmon and steelhead runs in the Columbia Basin are closer to extinction than to recovery. Federal courts have struck down five successive BPA-led salmon recovery plans as inadequate and illegal.

So where are we now? BPA’s recent “policy decision” to join that Arkansas-based energy pool rather than the regional one falls squarely in this pattern of poor decision-making. A BPA-funded economic evaluation heavily favored the regional market. U.S. senators from Oregon and Washington repeatedly noted BPA’s study failed to find any scenario showing financial benefits to the Arkansas-based market. But BPA has not changed course; it remains wedded to joining the more costly market.

Then, days after announcing its market decision, BPA weighed in on the Northwest Power and Conservation Council’s Fish and Wildlife Program update, recommending amendments that would eliminate salmon recovery goals and evade the agency’s obligation to protect salmon and steelhead in the Columbia Basin.

It was a stunning announcement and yet sadly in keeping with a history we’ve observed for far too long. BPA fails to learn from its past mistakes. As a result, it’s critical that citizens and decision-makers keep BPA’s history in mind and work to correct its latest errors.

Bill Arthur worked as a Sierra Club staffer for 32 years including positions as Northwest Regional director and deputy Western Beyond Coal Campaign director. Now retired, he is a volunteer activist and chairs the club’s three-state Columbia-Snake Restoration Campaign. Marc Sullivan is Western Washington coordinator for the Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition. He formerly served as executive director of the Northwest Energy Coalition, as a senior project manager at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and as director of Strategic Planning for Seattle City Light.

The Daily Herald: Comment: BPA adds to long history of poor resource management