At its January meeting, Northwest Power and Conservation Council members elected Idaho’s Jeff Allen to serve as chair and Washington’s KC Golden to serve as vice chair of the four-state agency.
Bonneville Power Administration will divvy up $500 million of excess revenue from its 2022 fiscal year, giving 70 percent to its customers to keep power rates down, 20 percent to pay down debt or for revenue financing and just 10 percent to its fish and wildlife program, mostly to help pay upkeep for hatcheries and fish screens, not directly for recovery of salmon and steelhead.
Of the seven species of salmon and steelhead that inhabit Washington state’s waters -- and are listed under the federal Endangered Species Act as at risk of extinction-- Hood Canal summer chum salmon and Snake River fall Chinook salmon are approaching their recovery goals, according to a biennial report soon to be released by the Washington Governor’s Salmon Recovery Office.
In 2022, anglers caught and removed more than 140,000 northern pikeminnow from the Columbia and Snake rivers, which the Bonneville Power Administration says is protecting hundreds of thousands of young salmon and steelhead from predation.
By anyone’s measure, sockeye salmon runs have skyrocketed since 1997 in the Okanogan River basin when a transboundary workgroup decided to begin efforts to reintroduce the fish into Okanogan Lake in British Columbia, according to tribal biologists speaking at this week’s Northwest Power and Conservation Council meeting.
A team of scientists generally gave good marks for a long-term, three-phase plan by the Upper Columbia United Tribes to reintroduce salmon and steelhead upstream of two major Columbia River dams that have blocked passage of the fish for 80 years.
NOAA Fisheries has approved $2.3 million for Trout Unlimited to conduct a planning and feasibility assessment for the removal of Enloe Dam on Similkameen River, a tributary of the Columbia River. The dam has blocked salmon and steelhead passage for 100 years and, if completed, its removal would be the largest habitat restoration action in the Columbia River Basin.
Operations at thirteen federal dams in the Willamette River basin may soon be altered to aid threatened upper Willamette River spring Chinook, winter steelhead, and bull trout. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which operates the dams, released a draft operations and maintenance programmatic environmental impact statement late last week for public review until January 19, 2023.
The Bonneville Power Administration plans to capitalize on its strong 2022 fiscal year by holding its rates for electricity and transmission flat during the next rate case cycle, which is FY2023-25. In the same rate case, it is proposing to increase its Columbia River basin fish and wildlife mitigation expenses by 8 percent, the first time the power marketing agency has increased those costs since FY2018-19 when it vowed to keep fish and wildlife spending below the inflation rate.
Completing a process that began with a relicensing application from PacifiCorp in 2004, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has unanimously approved the removal of four dams on the Klamath River in Oregon and California.
Grant Public Utility District is taking the next step with its partner X-energy to build a modular nuclear power plant in Washington. The utility hopes to have the up-to-320 megawatt 4-unit power plant online by as soon as 2028, according to its chief resource officer Kevin Nordt.
NOAA Fisheries has finalized a report that identifies actions that the agency says have the greatest likelihood of making progress toward rebuilding populations of salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River basin to “healthy and harvestable levels.” The agency had released a draft in July for limited comments.
If it funds a quarter-million-dollar study, the Washington state legislature could kick-start a long-awaited dam removal project that would free up some 348 miles of habitat for steelhead and salmon in northeastern Washington and British Columbia.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has provided hydropower operators with new data to better prepare for extreme weather events in the Pacific Northwest and shifts in seasonal energy demands caused by climate change.
Oregon’s Energy Facility Siting Council on Tuesday approved a permit to build the Boardman to Hemingway transmission line across five eastern Oregon counties. The line will move power between the Pacific Northwest and Intermountain West, helping meet customer needs during peak seasons. Construction is expected to start in 2023.
Nearly three-dozen Pacific Northwest organizations have sent a letter to the State Department and other federal agencies urging the Biden Administration to better inform the region on efforts to overhaul the 1964 U.S.-Canada Columbia River Treaty, add “ecosystem function” as a treaty purpose, and include Columbia River basin Tribes in treaty governance. The letter also expresses concerns about potential “called-upon” river operations if the treaty is not modernized by 2024.
The megadrought in the Southwestern United States is the driest—and longest—in the last 1,200 years, depleting water reservoir levels to critically low levels over the past 22 years. This persistent drought has policymakers and system planners concerned about the reliability of the electric grid under worsening drought conditions and climbing temperatures.
An 8.7 percent bump in the Bonneville Power Administration’s Fish and Wildlife budget in fiscal year 2024-25 is the largest increase for fish and wildlife since 2010. The increase will give the power marketing agency, which pays for the Northwest Power and Conservation Council’s Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program, more flexibility to “get things done.”
The Northwest Power and Conservation Council has hired Ann E. Gravatt to be its communications and public affairs director. She will join the Council on September 28.
Did last week’s release of the final “Lower Snake River Dams: Benefit Replacement Report” by Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and U.S. Sen. Patty Murray move the needle in seeking regional consensus on a comprehensive plan to improve the condition of Columbia/Snake River salmon and steelhead listed under the Endangered Species Act? If public reaction is any indication, the answer is no.
Breaching the four lower Snake River dams to improve salmon runs is only feasible after state and federal officials have replaced or mitigated the benefits of the dams, said Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and U.S. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) in releasing Thursday the final “Lower Snake River Dams: Benefit Replacement Report.”
If not for the flexibility provided by the federal Columbia/Snake river hydroelectric system, including the four lower Snake River dams, it is not clear how the Northwest could have balanced energy supply and demand during an extreme low water event in February 2019, according to a recent study commissioned by the Public Power Council, an opponent of breaching the dams.
Wind energy continues to see strong growth, solid performance, and attractive prices in the U.S., according to a report released by the U.S. Department of Energy and prepared by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. With levelized costs of just over $30 per megawatt-hour for newly built projects, the cost of wind is well below its grid-system, health, and climate benefits.
Urgent and comprehensive large-scale actions in the Columbia River basin will be needed to meet mid-range salmon and steelhead abundance goals set by the Columbia Basin Partnership Task Force in 2020, according to a draft report by NOAA Fisheries released nearly a month ago by the White House. The agency is now taking comments until the end of the month on a report that could play a key role in the Biden Administration’s efforts to collaboratively move forward on Columbia/Snake river salmon recovery.
U.S. District Court Judge Michael H. Simon this morning agreed to a request by the Biden Administration and plaintiffs to extend for another year the stay in the litigation challenging the federal government’s environmental impact statement and biological opinion for Columbia/Snake river salmon and steelhead. The parties want more time to identify “comprehensive” solutions to basin salmon recovery.
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