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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTrump considering sale of Bonneville Power administration
To ride down the Columbia River as the John Day Dams wall of concrete slowly fills the view from a tugboat is to see what the countrys largest network of energy-producing dams created through five decades of 20th-century ambition, investment and hubris.
Nearly half of the nations 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.
Google taps the rivers energy to power a data center 90 minutes east of Portland, Ore. drawn there by some of the cheapest, most environmentally friendly electricity in the nation. Farmers farther upriver in Washington State pump irrigation water into alfalfa fields with both the water and the electricity supplied by a dam. The Space Needle in Seattle uses Columbia River electricity to slowly spin tourists in its sky-view restaurant. High-voltage transmission lines shoot south to California.
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 basins output, to private buyers.
The idea is part of a package of proposals that would transform much of the infrastructure in the United States to a mixture of public and private partnerships, lowering costs to taxpayers and improving efficiency, administration officials said. Assets of two other big public power operators, based in Colorado and Oklahoma, would be sold, too, if Congress approves the measure.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/28/us/columbia-river-privatization.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news
CentralMass
(15,265 posts)Xolodno
(6,311 posts)*cough*Enron*cough*
Docreed2003
(16,793 posts)Who the hell still buys this line of crap?
jpak
(41,724 posts)yup
Cicada
(4,533 posts)defacto7
(13,485 posts)won't pull it off without dismantling government first. It takes time and time is no longer on their side.
L. Coyote
(51,129 posts)The Republicans won't be satisfied until there is no government left except themselves privately owning the whole country.