Credit: EcoFlight
By Nancy Hirsh and Liz Hamilton
April 8, 2026
The Bonneville Power Administration, the federal agency that sells Columbia Basin hydropower, is required by law to make decisions that are economically beneficial for its customers. It also must protect and mitigate harm to our environment, including imperiled salmon and steelhead.
BPA is failing at both, and using salmon protection as a distraction for its bad decisions and rising energy costs.
Last week, BPA held a public workshop to begin planning for an expedited rate proceeding that would allow the federal agency to raise rates for its power services. If approved, BPA’s utility customers will likely see an increase in their energy bills.
Rate proceedings generally don’t draw much public attention. This one deserves extra scrutiny because BPA is being disingenuous in ways that harm both people and fish.
Let’s review what led us here.
This past summer, the Trump Administration unilaterally terminated the historic Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement. Signed in 2023, the agreement provided continuity for hydropower operations and paused long-standing litigation for a decade.
The agreement supported federal, state, and tribal efforts to recover endangered Columbia Basin fish while investing in communities and necessary infrastructure and advancing new clean energy resources to serve the region.
After the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement ended, the state of Oregon and conservation, fishing and clean energy groups had no alternative but to return to court to protect salmon — and the state of Washington, the Nez Perce Tribe and the Yakama Nation joined in support.
Meanwhile, the federal government proposed 2026 hydropower operations that were even worse than before for salmon.
In late February, a federal court sided with plaintiffs and required federal agencies to modify their proposed 2026 operations of the Columbia Basin hydropower system to prevent serious salmon declines.
The court ordered increased spill over eight dams on the lower Columbia and Snake rivers, in time for the 2026 juvenile fish out-migration that begins each year in March and continues through the end of August — allowing juvenile fish to pass over the dams instead of through lethal turbines.
The spill is an emergency measure, needed because of the repeated failure of BPA and other federal agencies to adequately protect salmon. As the court order noted, the agencies have a “disappointing history of government avoidance and manipulation instead of sincere efforts at solving the problem and genuinely remediating the harm.”
For three decades and counting, BPA and its public power allies have resisted developing real solutions that would protect salmon, modernize the power system, and ensure a reliable, affordable energy future. And when the court has ordered the agencies to do better, BPA has inflated the cost of compliance without providing adequate data or justification.
Now let’s talk about what’s really causing energy costs and customer bills to rise. Spoiler alert: Salmon protections are not even in the top five.
In October 2025, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Brattle Group released an analysis outlining the top five factors causing electricity rate increases between 2019 and 2024.
These included overdue updates and repairs to the power and transmission system and supply chain problems; extreme weather and wildfire mitigation; methane gas price volatility; rising electricity demand due in part to data centers, and costs to integrate new industrial wind and solar projects into an outdated grid.
Salmon protection measures do not make the list, and while they do have costs, they are not the factors driving affordability or reliability concerns.
Also, the recent court-ordered emergency measures explicitly provide flexibility for the federal government to modify hydropower operations whenever there is any risk to power system reliability or emergency conditions. The federal government has always successfully modified fish operations for these kinds of situations.
Despite misleading claims by BPA and some of the utilities, the operations recently ordered by the court are very similar to those implemented in 2024 and 2025. During those years, hydropower adjustments to help salmon did not lead to reliability challenges or the need for salmon-specific rate increases.
If BPA and these utilities are really concerned about affordability, they would be transparent about the cost of BPA’s recent decision to join the wrong energy market, despite analysis by BPA and other experts showing substantial harm and cost to the entire region. This poor choice by BPA will increase costs for customers by $165 million to $221 million annually compared to the alternative option preferred by many in the region.
The Northwest has real affordability and reliability issues to grapple with in the coming decade. Blaming salmon recovery protections that are vital to our Northwest way of life is a sad and divisive course of action. Now is the time for BPA and their public utility allies to do what’s best for customers and the region and rebuild trust by upholding its obligations to our environment, salmon, tribal treaties, and all utility customers across the Northwest.
Nancy Hirsh is an energy consultant who has 40 years of energy, utility, and regulatory experience and the former director of the NW Energy Coalition. She lives in Seattle.
Liz Hamilton is the policy director of the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association. She lives in Oregon City, Oregon.
