What do you know about the changing landscape of electric power here at Skamania PUD? Across Washington state? The northwestern US? The entire USA? Does Canada affect our power?
A question I've heard many times goes like this: Bonneville Dam is right here in Skamania County! Why isn’t our power cheaper? That’s a fantastic question with a complicated answer. Bonneville Dam is as close to a perfect power source as it gets. It was built long ago, so it should already be paid for, and therefore “free” to use now. Its fuel is “free” water that flows from Canada and countless northwest tributaries like our Wind and White Salmon Rivers.
The dam produces more power than Skamania County can use, so if we owned it, we could sell excess power to pay for the upkeep and operation of the dam, transformers, poles, wires, and the wages of PUD workers managing those resources. So far so good, right? That example is not a fantasy. Some Washington PUDs own dams on the Columbia and their situation can fit the example | just gave. Unfortunately, we don’t own Bonneville Dam. The dam is owned by the Federal Government and its power is managed by the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA). BPA controls a network of power-producing equipment dominated by Columbia River dams and many miles of huge transmission towers and wires. Our PUD (you and me) is fortunate to have Bonneville Dam here for many reasons such as 1) it provides abundant and reliable power, and 2) the dam provides many good, local jobs. We buy power from BPA at rates determined largely by their costs.
This is where it gets complicated. State and Federal legislation and even Canadian law affect BPA’s operation. Bonneville Dam was designed to produce power in the most efficient way any machine can be used, by running it 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. When a machine like that isn’t used at its full capacity, its value goes down and the cost to run goes up. The same is true for a train locomotive or a jet airliner.
Bonneville Dam's workers must keep their machine available and ready to generate power. The machine only pays for itself when it's moving turbines with water. When the machine is not being used, the cost to support its readiness doesn't go down, so the total cost of running the machine goes up. Other power sources within BPA’s network are running the same. Generators using coal, natural gas, and nuclear fission are examples of 24/7 generators we’ve enjoyed for most of the past century. Today is very different. 24/7 resources are being idled or decommissioned in favor of subsidized intermittent resources. Namely wind turbines that only deliver when the wind blows and solar arrays that only deliver when the sun shines.
To mitigate these deficiencies, large lithium battery installations are being built to replace retiring gas and coal. Acres of batteries. These battery resources compete directly with and drive the cost up of batteries used in phones, computers, power tools and electric cars. In current plans for just the western US, battery arrays containing enough battery storage to build hundreds of thousands of electric cars are to be placed near wind and solar arrays. Did I mention it was complicated? In our state, recent legislation called the Clean Energy Transformation Act (CETA) is a great example of the laws enforcing these types of changes to our sources of energy. I’d recommend everyone learn about it to better understand some of the reasons our cost of living here in Washington and especially rural places like our county are rising rapidly. Times are changing fast. Meanwhile, we’ll do our best to keep the wires hot, but it might not be a bad idea to have a generator and plenty of “fossil” fuel on hand to power it because we don’t own or operate Bonneville Dam.