Northern lights face blackouts

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Northern lights face blackouts: A power drought from Seattle to Portland

http://www.capitolalert.com/news/capalert02_20010325.html

By Stuart Leavenworth and Carrie Peyton, Bee Staff Writers

(Published March 25, 2001)

Nearly a mile wide and filled with 21 million tons of concrete, Washington's Grand Coulee Dam is a monument to chutzpah, a symbol of how nature's power can be harnessed and turned into electricity.

But you can't harness what nature doesn't provide, and as California clamors for more power from its neighbors, the Northwest is suffering through its worst drought in decades, turning regional powerhouses such as Grand Coulee into 21-million-ton weaklings.

The result: California, which barely escaped blackouts last summer with as many 3,000 megawatts daily from the Northwest, probably won't get any from there this summer, making outages even more likely. Even states such as Oregon and Washington face a risk of blackouts, like those that rippled through California on Monday and Tuesday.

"It is questionable whether the Pacific Northwest will have enough power for itself this summer," said Michael Zenker, an analyst with Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

That message was hammered home last week when officials from the Bonneville Power Administration, the agency that markets power from the Northwest's federal dams, visited some of their counterparts in California. The Bonneville officials arrived in time for a second day of blackouts across the state, an experience that left them sobered but still pessimistic they could do anything to help.

"Pretty bleak," said Bonneville's Bill Berry, when asked about his outlook for sending electrons south this summer. "There will be very little power to export." Nature's cruel trick is just one of many foisted on the West Coast since California ventured into deregulation five years ago. The region's most populous state is now short thousands of megawatts on any given day and is at the mercy of power generators who can command wholesale prices 20 times higher than normal.

With normal rainfall, the Northwest probably wouldn't even notice California's problems. But as the drought deepens, Bonneville and the region's utilities can't always generate enough hydropower to serve their own needs and have had to buy more power on the spot market, where prices have been pushed higher by California's crisis. In turn, some utilities there have hiked rates for customers by 30 percent or more.

"Oregon and Washington are feeling the impacts of California's power crisis,"said Rich Golb, a water consultant who recently moved from Northern California to Portland. "The crisis is starting to reverberate northward, and the drought doesn't help."

As Golb is quick to note, Northwesterners are not panicking -- at least not yet. In Seattle and Portland, the coffee shops are bustling, and the economy continues to perk. Outside the cities, the hills are lush and green and the mountains capped with snow, making the proclamation of drought somewhat difficult to fathom.

But for people who fish and boat on the fabled Columbia River, the drought's impacts are becoming visible. Snowpack throughout the Columbia basin is 53 percent of normal, and the Columbia's flows are half what they should be. Lake Roosevelt, the vast reservoir that backs up behind Grand Coulee Dam, is at its lowest point in decades. If it drops another 15 feet, Grand Coulee Dam -- capable of generating 6,000 megawatts -- won't be able to generate power.

"This already is the worst drought in our state since 1977, and it's only March," said Washington Gov. Gary Locke while announcing a statewide emergency two weeks ago. "We'll probably beat that record soon."

Although California can't take blame for the weather, the Golden State is taking a beating for some of the Northwest's problems. In a recent editorial, the Portland Oregonian called Californians "power gluttons." Some environmentalists have gone further, saying California is "killing salmon," because it wants the Northwest to export more power -- and use up more water that could be saved for endangered fish.

Much of the blame is off-target, said Steven Weiss, a Portland-based policy analyst for the Northwest Energy Coalition, an alliance of environmental groups. Weiss notes that California consumes less energy per capita than states in the Pacific Northwest. Part of the reason Northwesterners are so wasteful, said Weiss, is that they have grown accustomed to cheap, subsidized hydropower, which supplies 70 percent of the region's energy.

"There's this idea up here that Californians are now paying cheaper rates for electricity than us," said Weiss. "It's one of these big myths." On the other hand, Weiss said California concocted a deregulation scheme that, in his view, was tailor-made to create shortages and higher wholesale prices. As a result, he said, Bonneville has wracked up $500 million in bills buying power for the Northwest on the wholesale market.

On paper, of course, Bonneville also has been making millions selling surplus power to California utilities and power purchases. But because of the state's energy woes, Bonneville hasn't been getting paid and could face its own solvency problems later this summer.

"People have been calling this a 'perfect storm' of events, where you have high prices, a drought and a shortage of power, with California having none to sell," said Weiss. "Bonneville could probably deal with one of those factors, but when they all came at once, there wasn't much they could do."

Named after a French fur trader, the Bonneville Power Administration would seem an unlikely agency to elicit much sympathy from environmentalists. The BPA, which markets power from 29 federal dams, mainly in Washington and Oregon, supplies 40 percent of the region's power and has been a key benefactor of aluminum manufacturers and the aerospace and farm industries.

In recent years, however, Bonneville has been an important player -- and key source of funding -- in financing recovery efforts for the Northwest's endangered salmon. When Bonneville is flush with money or water, it can more easily release water to wash baby fish downstream, or collect the fish and truck them around dams so they can safely reach the sea.

This month, however, Bonneville's acting chief Steven Wright announced that, to save water for hydropower needs, he would have to curtail spring and summer releases of water for fish. In mid-March, the agency did a single "fish spill" from Bonneville Dam that was ten times smaller than normal. Had the agency used it for power, it could have earned $2.1 million.

Environmentalists such as Weiss fear, if the drought drags out, the Columbia River will run so shallow and warm that it will kill returning salmon, or deplete streams to the extent that the fish eggs will be left high and dry. Eight times this winter, BPA has invoked a provision of the Endangered Species Act that allows the agency to run its hydro turbines instead of storing water for salmon runs.

Even with reduced protections, however, California probably won't be able to obtain more power. In their meeting this week, officials with the California Independent System Operator asked their Bonneville counterparts if they'd be able to expand a trading arrangement for electricity. The answer? It could be tricky.

Currently, Bonneville sends power to California during peak hours when ISO's supplies are tight. Then, at night, when prices are cheaper, the ISO sends twice as much power produced in California to Bonneville. The arrangement allows Bonneville to conserve its water at night.

To expand the arrangement ISO wants a system where, along with a 24-hour exchange, California could send its excess power to Bonneville during off-peak hours of the spring, creating a bank account it could draw from this summer. But expanding the program much could be difficult. According to Berry, Bonneville may need to reserve nearly all its water this summer for Northwest power generation and its fish obligations under the Endangered Species Act.

"We'd like to have an enormous bank for the summer," said Ed Riley, the ISO's director of grid operations. "But they're not going to let us do that."

Up and down the West Coast, officials say 2001 could be a long, grim summer. With blackouts looming, air pollution regulators across the west are allowing businesses to invest in backup diesel generators, in effect, trading clean air for energy reliability. To preserve power, Bonneville is paying industries $400 million to idle some of their plants. To save water, it may pay millions more for farmers to stop irrigating their fields.

In California, Oregon and Washington, governors of all three states want the Bush administration to impose caps on wholesale electricity prices so the region's crisis doesn't intensify. So far, Bush has refused, saying caps would discourage the construction of new power plants.

Some say the West Coast needs to look beyond short-term fixes and consider how it can sustain its burgeoning population, which has added 13 million people since its last region-wide drought in the late 1970s.

"For 20 years, all of our policies on natural resources have been made in isolation," said Golb, who previously headed the Northern California Water Association. "We deregulated electricity in California without much consideration to what would happen in a drought. We have allocated water to the environment, perhaps rightfully so, without much consideration to what happens in an energy shortage."

Any solution, he added, has to be regional. "This is one of the big lessons of this crisis," said Golb. "Our resources are interrelated."

-- Swissrose (cellier3@mindspring.com), March 25, 2001


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