Down the Mighty Columbia River, Where a Power Struggle Looms
In Sherman County, Ore., for example, southeast of The Dalles, President Trump won 72 percent of the vote,
and critics of Bonneville Power seem just about as prevalent because of how grid operators have incorporated, or not, the new rising force of wind energy into a system dominated by hydropower.
“When you privatize, what happens to the voice of the Indian people?”
PASCO, Wash. — While the idea of selling some or all of what the federal government built here is not new
— President Ronald Reagan floated the idea in the early 1980s — it’s a much different debate this time.
Wringing profits from a system that has provided electricity at cost would inevitably raise prices, critics of the idea
said, while supporters envision a streamlined grid open to innovations that government managers cannot imagine.
Now, the Trump administration has proposed rethinking the entire system, with a plan to sell the transmission network of wires and substations owned by the Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency
that distributes most of the Columbia basin’s output, to private buyers.
Native American tribal leaders said that the old river would never come back, but
that the federal government was now bound, through court decisions and treaties, to work with tribes going forward.
Nearly half of the nation’s hydropower electricity comes from more than 250 hydropower dams
that were built on the Columbia and its tributaries — a vast and complex arc of industry and technology that touches tens of millions of lives across the West every day.