July 10, 2025

CONTACT: Joseph Bogaard, Executive Director, Save Our wild Salmon Coalition, joseph@wildsalmon.org / 206-300-1003

The Save Our wild Salmon Coalition (SOS) appreciates the leadership and decision by conservation and clean energy advocates to file a lawsuit challenging the Bonneville Power Administration’s (BPA) decision to join the Southwest Power Pool’s Markets+ day-ahead energy trading market. SOS Executive Director Joseph Bogaard explained, “BPA’s choice of Markets+ over the alternative Extended Day Ahead Market (EDAM) is inexplicable on multiple levels – system reliability, integration of new renewable energy, impacts on energy costs and imperiled Northwest salmon and steelhead – and we applaud the groups that have stepped up to advocate for the best interest of our region to take this legal action.”

SOS is a coalition of over 50 Northwest and national conservation organizations, recreational and commercial fishing associations, businesses, clean energy organizations, and orca and river advocates. Its mission is to protect and restore abundant, self-sustaining, harvestable populations of salmon and steelhead in the Columbia-Snake River Basin for the benefit of freshwater and marine ecosystems, and Northwest communities and our special ways of life.

EDAM, with or without BPA, is shaping up to be a much larger energy market, with a more diverse set of renewable energy resources. Access to those clean energy resources will reduce pressure on Northwest hydropower operations to maximize power output, while allowing greater flexibility that can benefit threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead populations in the Columbia River Basin. “This is exactly the kind of foreseeable environmental impact that the National Environmental Policy Act required federal agencies to analyze before making decisions”, said Bogaard, adding, “BPA’s refusal to look at those impacts is a brazen attempt to sidestep one of our nation’s most fundamental environmental laws. It positively invited the challenge that now asks the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to enforce the law. We appreciate the groups that are challenging BPA’s lawless conduct.”

“BPA’s decision to join Markets+ knowing the long-term cost, consequences, and harm is shocking, especially when the benefits of EDAM are so apparent—for ratepayers, salmon, and the health of our rivers and regional clean energy goals.” — Joseph Bogaard

BPA’s market choice is just one of several recent actions that threaten recovery of salmon and steelhead. Shortly after issuing its markets decision, BPA asked the Northwest Power and Conservation Council to eliminate its legal responsibility and the long-standing goal of seeing 5 million adult salmonids return annually to the Basin. The Trump Administration followed this request by terminating on June 12 the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement (RCBA), which included a broad array of urgent recovery actions and investments by the federal government in close partnership with Northwest states and Tribes. Announced by the Biden Administration in December 2023, the RCBA also included a pause in long-running litigation challenging an illegal 2020 BPA-led federal salmon plan.

BPA’s leadership to mitigate the federal hydro-system's impacts on salmon, invest in transmission and new clean energy resources, and maintain affordability is more important now than ever. It’s unfortunate that legal action is necessary to ensure BPA lives up to its public responsibilities, honors Tribal Treaty rights, and considers the best interests of rate payers and clean energy needs across the region.

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