Editorial: Sale of BPA lines would bring higher power bills
With every payment over the years, customers of the Snohomish Public Utility District have helped build and maintain the electrical grid that the Northwest depends upon to supply electricity to homes, schools, hospitals, businesses and industries.
Of the electricity that the Snohomish PUD supplies to its customers, 80 percent of it is generated at Bonneville Power Administration dams — and one nuclear power plant — and is sent over a high-voltage transmission system that covers 300,000 square miles in the Northwest by way of more than 15,000 miles of power lines and nearly 300 substations. The BPA manages about 75 percent of the high-voltage lines in the Northwest, serving 12.5 million residents in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and parts of Montana.
The Trump administration in its recent budget proposal to Congress has targeted for cuts or elimination a number of successful Energy Department programs that fund research into technology, such as better batteries for electric vehicles; encourage energy conservation, such as Energy Star; and offer assistance programs to help weatherize homes and help low-income families and seniors pay their power bills. But the president also has floated a proposal to auction off the BPA’s transmission system for a one-time infusion of $4.9 billion into the federal treasury between 2018 to 2027, as reported recently by The Oregonian and the Tri-City Herald.
The Bonneville Power Administration, an agency of the federal Department of Energy, was created by Congress in 1937, following construction of the Grand Coulee and Bonneville hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River. It’s now responsible for 31 federally managed dams and a power-generating reactor at Hanford.
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