The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) is an American federal agency operating in the

Pacific Northwest The Pacific Northwest (sometimes Cascadia, or simply abbreviated as PNW) is a geographic region in western North America bounded by its coastal waters of the Pacific Ocean to the west and, loosely, by the Rocky Mountains to the east. Though ...

. BPA was created by an act of

Congress A congress is a formal meeting of the representatives of different countries, constituent states, organizations, trade unions, political parties, or other groups. The term originated in Late Middle English to denote an encounter (meeting of a ...

in 1937 to market electric power from the

Bonneville Dam Bonneville Lock and Dam consists of several run-of-the-river dam structures that together complete a span of the Columbia River between the U.S. states of Oregon and Washington at River Mile 146.1. The dam is located east of Portland, Oregon, ...

located on the

Columbia River The Columbia River (Upper Chinook: ' or '; Sahaptin: ''Nch’i-Wàna'' or ''Nchi wana''; Sinixt dialect'' '') is the largest river in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. The river rises in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, C ...

and to construct facilities necessary to transmit that power. Congress has since designated Bonneville to be the marketing agent for power from all of the federally owned hydroelectric projects in the Pacific Northwest. Bonneville is one of four regional Federal power marketing agencies within the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

Operations

Bonneville Power Administration (system map, October 2020)

The power generated on BPA's grid is sold to public utilities, private utilities, and industry on the grid. The excess is sold to other grids in

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

, California and other regions. Because BPA is a public entity, it does not make a profit on power sales or from providing transmission services. BPA also coordinates with the

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers , colors = , anniversaries = 16 June (Organization Day) , battles = , battles_label = Wars , website = , commander1 = ...

and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to regulate flow of water in the

and to carry out environmental projects such as

salmon Salmon () is the common name for several list of commercially important fish species, commercially important species of euryhaline ray-finned fish from the family (biology), family Salmonidae, which are native to tributary, tributaries of the ...

restoration. Although BPA is part of the DOE, it is self-funded and covers its costs by selling its products and services at cost. The BPA provides about 28% of the electricity used in the region. BPA transmits and sells wholesale

electricity Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as described ...

in eight western states:

Washington Washington commonly refers to: * Washington (state), United States * Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States ** A metonym for the federal government of the United States ** Washington metropolitan area, the metropolitan area centered o ...

Oregon Oregon () is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. The Columbia River delineates much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while the Snake River delineates much of it ...

Idaho Idaho ( ) is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. To the north, it shares a small portion of the Canada–United States border with the province of British Columbia. It borders the states of Montana and Wyom ...

Montana Montana () is a state in the Mountain West division of the Western United States. It is bordered by Idaho to the west, North Dakota and South Dakota to the east, Wyoming to the south, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbi ...

Wyoming Wyoming () is a U.S. state, state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It is bordered by Montana to the north and northwest, South Dakota and Nebraska to the east, Idaho to the west, Utah to the south ...

Utah Utah ( , ) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. Utah is a landlocked U.S. state bordered to its east by Colorado, to its northeast by Wyoming, to its north by Idaho, to its south by Arizona, and to it ...

Nevada Nevada ( ; ) is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, Western region of the United States. It is bordered by Oregon to the northwest, Idaho to the northeast, California to the west, Arizona to the southeast, and Utah to the east. N ...

, and

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

. BPA now markets the electricity from thirty-one federal

hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River There are more than 60 dams in the Columbia River watershed in the United States and Canada. Tributaries of the Columbia River and their dammed tributaries, as well as the main stem itself, each have their own list below. The dams are listed in ...

and its tributaries, as well as from the

Columbia Generating Station Columbia Generating Station is a nuclear commercial energy facility located on the Hanford Site, north of Richland, Washington. It is owned and operated by Energy Northwest, a Washington state, not-for-profit joint operating agency. Licensed by ...

, a nuclear plant located on the

Hanford Site The Hanford Site is a decommissioned nuclear production complex operated by the United States federal government on the Columbia River in Benton County in the U.S. state of Washington. The site has been known by many names, including SiteW a ...

in eastern Washington. BPA has more than 15,000 miles (24,000 km) of electrical lines and 261 substations in the

and controls approximately 75 percent of the high-voltage (230 kV and higher) transmission capacity in the region. BPA also maintains connection lines with other

power grid An electrical grid is an interconnected network for electricity delivery from producers to consumers. Electrical grids vary in size and can cover whole countries or continents. It consists of:Kaplan, S. M. (2009). Smart Grid. Electrical Power ...

s. It connects to the California high-voltage transmission system by

Path 66 California Oregon Intertie (COI), identified as Path 66 by Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC), is a corridor of three roughly parallel 500 kV alternating current power lines connecting the electric grids of Oregon and California. Th ...

, which consists of the two 500 kV AC lines of the Pacific AC Intertie, plus a third 500 kV AC line of the California-Oregon Transmission Project (COTP) (managed by the Balancing Authority of Northern California). Together these three lines are operated as the California-Oregon Intertie (COI) (managed by the

California Independent System Operator The California Independent System Operator (CAISO) is a non-profit Independent System Operator (ISO) serving California. It oversees the operation of California's bulk electric power system, transmission lines, and electricity market generated a ...

CAISO). An additional DC ±500 kV line, the

Pacific DC Intertie The Pacific DC Intertie (also called Path 65) is an electric power transmission line that transmits electricity from the Pacific Northwest to the Los Angeles area using HVDC, high voltage direct current (HVDC). The line capacity is 3.1 gigawatt ...

, links BPA's grid at the

Celilo Converter Station The Celilo Converter Station, built in 1970 and owned and operated by the Bonneville Power Administration, is the northern terminus of the Pacific DC Intertie, near The Dalles, Oregon, in the United States. History The Celilo Converter Station ...

near

The Dalles, Oregon The Dalles is the largest city of Wasco County, Oregon, United States. The population was 16,010 at the 2020 census, and it is the largest city on the Oregon side of the Columbia River between the Portland Metropolitan Area, and Hermiston ...

to the

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is the largest municipal utility in the United States with 8,100 megawatts of electric generating capacity (2021-2022) and delivering an average of 435 million gallons of water per day to more ...

(LADWP) grid 800 miles (1,300 km) away at the

Sylmar Converter Station The Sylmar Converter Station is the southern converter station of the Pacific DC Intertie, an electric power transmission line which transmits electricity from the Celilo Converter Station outside The Dalles, Oregon to Sylmar, a neighborhood in t ...

Los Angeles Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world' ...

. The Northern Intertie crosses the Canada–US border in two locations at Blaine, Washington and Nelway, British Columbia and connects to two

BC Hydro The British Columbia Hydro and Power Authority, operating as BC Hydro, is a Canadian electric utility in the province of British Columbia. It is the main electricity distributor, serving more than 4 million customers in most areas, with the exce ...

AC 500 kV lines and several lower

voltage Voltage, also known as electric pressure, electric tension, or (electric) potential difference, is the difference in electric potential between two points. In a static electric field, it corresponds to the work needed per unit of charge to m ...

lines. Because BPA owns and operates transmission equipment and locations, its workers perform its own

vegetation management Conservation grazing or targeted grazing is the use of semi-feral or domesticated grazing livestock to maintain and increase the biodiversity of natural or semi-natural grasslands, heathlands, wood pasture, wetlands and many other habitats.

. BPA uses helicopters to

sling load A cargo hook is a device suspended below a helicopter and allows the transport of external loads during flight. Common terms for this operation include slingwork, underslung loads, external loadwork, and external load operations. Hook types P ...

maintenance workers inspecting and repairing power lines.

History

BPA's first industrial sale was to

Alcoa Alcoa Corporation (an acronym for Aluminum Company of America) is a Pittsburgh-based industrial corporation. It is the world's eighth-largest producer of aluminum. Alcoa conducts operations in 10 countries. Alcoa is a major producer of primary ...

in January 1940, to provide 32,500 kilowatts of power. This, and the following 162,500 kilowatt order, led to complaints of the Bonneville Power Act's anti-monopoly clause. The cheap price of aluminum from Alcoa helped aluminum sales grow in the post-

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

market. Overly optimistic estimates of future electricity consumption by BPA in the 1960s led the agency to guarantee some bonds for the disastrous

Washington Public Power Supply System Energy Northwest (formerly Washington Public Power Supply System) is a public power joint operating agency in the northwest United States, formed in 1957 by Washington state law to produce at-cost power for Northwest utilities. Headquartered in ...

nuclear power project. Out of five nuclear power plants started ( WNP-1 and WNP-4,

WNP-3 and WNP-5 Washington Nuclear Project Nos. 3 and 5, abbreviated as WNP-3 and WNP-5 (collectively known as the Satsop Nuclear Power Plant) were two of the five nuclear power plants on which construction was started by the Washington Public Power Supply Syste ...

), only WNP-2 was completed. BPA is still making payments on three of the abandoned plants. In 2003, BPA's debt for the nuclear project totaled $6.2 billion. In 1973,

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions ...

and

Paul Allen Paul Gardner Allen (January 21, 1953 – October 15, 2018) was an American business magnate, computer programmer, researcher, investor, and philanthropist. He co-founded Microsoft Corporation with childhood friend Bill Gates in 1975, which h ...

were hired by Bob Barnett to write software for the

PDP-10 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especi ...

computer that managed BPA's power grid and remained in operation until 2013. In 2014, the BPA Library discovered a collection of old films made by the agency and began posting digital versions of them on the agency's website. Included in the collection is the award-winning documentary "River of Power" which covers the Agency's history from its beginning to the present.River of Power (1987) film
''www.bpa.gov/news'', accessed 16 November 2019 The BPA gives its name to the BPA Trail in

Federal Way Federal Way is a city in King County, Washington, United States. One of the most recently incorporated cities in the county, its population was 101,030 at the 2020 census. Federal Way is the tenth-largest city in Washington and the fifth-larges ...

, a walking trail built beneath the power transmission lines.

Administrators

Notes

References

External links

*
Bonneville Power Administration
in the

Federal Register The ''Federal Register'' (FR or sometimes Fed. Reg.) is the official journal of the federal government of the United States that contains government agency rules, proposed rules, and public notices. It is published every weekday, except on feder ...

Historic American Engineering Record Heritage Documentation Programs (HDP) is a division of the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) responsible for administering the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), Historic American Engineering Record (HAER), and Historic American Landscapes ...

(HAER) documentation: ** ** ** {{authority control Columbia River New Deal agencies United States Department of Energy Companies based in Portland, Oregon Renewable energy in the United States New Deal in Oregon Public utilities of the United States Water management authorities in the United States