(Courtesy of OPB, May 12, 2025 and OregonLive, May 13,2025)
Oregon and Washington passed aggressive goals to decarbonize their power supply but left it to the Bonneville Power Administration to build the transmission lines needed for wind and solar. The agency hasn’t delivered.
Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek has said the state had been “leading the way for years on courageous state policies to fight climate change.” Along with neighboring Washington state, Oregon has set an ambitious mandate for electric utilities to be carbon neutral within the next two decades.
Oregon and Washington trail nearly all other states in adding new sources of renewable energy. What’s held the Northwest back is a bottleneck Oregon and Washington leaders paide little attentin to when they set out to go 100% green. Leaders left it to a federal agency, the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), to arrange badly needed upgrades to an electrical grid that’s nearly a century old in places. BPA decides which energy projects can hook up based on whether its infrastructure can handle the extra load, and it decides how quickly that infrastructure gets expanded. Its glacial pace has delayed wind and solar projects under Democratic and Republican presidents alike.
Of the 469 large renewable projects that applied to connect to BPA’s grid since 2015, only one has reached approval.
Efforts to bypass Bonneville didn’t start until this year, when Oregon and Washington legislators considered bills to create their own state bonding authorities for upgrading the regions’ high-voltage network. Both bills died.
Having failed to add enough green-energy sources or any new gas-fired power, the Northwest buys elecricity from elsewhere, at high prices, during extreme weather. Rates paid by customers of major Oregon utilities are now 50% higher than five years ago. The worsening energy shortage threatens millions of residents with continual rate hikes and sporadic power outages – – not to mention dashing the Northwest’s hopes of drastically reducing its contribution to climate change.
David Brown with his firm, Obsidian Renewables, is a case study in the long and agonizing pather to breaking ground on a Northwest solar farm. His plan is to put a vast array of solar panels on a piece of southern Oregon high desert that’s the size of 3,000 football fields. Brown said its expected to produce enough energy for about 110,000 homes. He asked BPA for permission to connect his solar farm to its system in 2020. He doesn’t expect approval until at least 2028.
Bonneville has estimated a cost of $212 million to build a substation, which would be owned by BPA, but paid by Obsidian Renewables.
Bonneville has said one reason for the slow progress is that its waitlist is jammed up with too many “speculative” projects. To speed things up, Bonneville has halted new requests for grid connections and changed its approach to reviewing applications. The agency said the new approach will increase the number of projects that get connected while cutting processing time in half, from an expected 15 years.
The agency erected more than 4,800 miles of high-voltage transmission lines from 1960 to 1990 built fewer than 500 miles from 1990 to 2020. In the past five years, it built 1 mile. Bonneville has the ability to borrow money, at low interest rates, for project that would enable the grid to carry more power. However, it has been reluctant to take on debt. It is still paying off billions of dollars in bonds from failed nuclear plants in the 1970’s. As recently as 2019, the agency’s finances were so poor that some economists expected it to become insolvent.
When Bonneville announced in the fall it would tap some of its expanded debt limit to help pay for $5 billion in transmission upgrades over a decade, renewable energy advocated characterized the work as long overdue maintenace that wouldn’t provie the expansion the grid needs.
A further frustraton for wind and solar developers that is unique to Bonneville. The grid operator makes them absorb an outsize share of the cost for projects that help the transmission network accomdoate their electricity – and it requires a big deposit up front. That’s true even if the new power lines benefit a wide network and will be around for many generations of customers.
Michelle Manary, Bonneville’s vice president of transmission marketing and sales, said requiring up-front deposits keeps existing ratepayers from getting stuck with the tab if a developer back out and that Bonneville has begun work on a transmission upgrade. She acknowledged the agency needs to reevaluate its policy amid the flood of applications for new projects , and she said that process is underway.