SACRAMENTO, Calif.—NRECA is fighting the Biden administration’s latest action to move toward breaching the Lower Snake River dams that provide clean, carbon-free hydropower to 55 electric cooperatives in eight Western states.
On Sept. 20, the Department of Energy announced that it would launch a study to explore how to “replace the power and services provided by the four Lower Snake River Dams” in southeast Washington.
“It’s difficult to imagine why anyone would want to breach the four dams on the Lower Snake River—3,000 megawatts of always-available, carbon-free capacity,” NRECA CEO Jim Matheson told co-op CEOs and directors this week at NRECA’s Regions 7&9 Meeting, where the dams were a big topic of discussion.
Matheson vowed that “NRECA will be very aggressive in advocating for the dams.”
Louis Finkel, NRECA’s senior vice president of Government Relations, said the association has already been meeting with the transition teams of Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump.
NRECA wants to ensure that the next president—regardless of who wins—will come to office understanding how important the dams are to reliable, affordable power in the West, Finkel said.
“Our passion is a reflection of your passion about this issue,” Finkel told co-op leaders at the regional meeting.
The DOE study comes in the wake of a settlement agreement reached in late 2023 among the Biden administration, environmental groups, and tribal and state governments over the federal government’s operation of the dams, which plaintiffs said are threatening the survival of endangered salmon. The settlement supports breaching the dams and replacing them with other types of renewable energy.
In January of this year, Matheson testified before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy, Climate and Grid Security, warning that efforts to breach the dams threaten the region’s power supply and would hurt farmers and economically disadvantaged rural communities.
Although it would take an act of Congress to actually breach the dams, the settlement agreement and DOE study show that the administration’s actions are “all geared to putting forward a trajectory toward breaching the dams,” Finkel said.
The DOE’s action comes as the Bonneville Power Administration, which provides power to co-ops from the dams, warned in its latest Pacific Northwest Loads and Resources Study that the region will experience rapidly escalating energy deficits in just three years as demand for electricity grows.
In addition to advocacy efforts by NRECA and co-op leaders, NRECA has activated its grassroots network—Voices for Cooperative Power—to oppose breaching the dams, said Kelly Cushman, NRECA’s vice president of political programs.
Last December, about 20,000 co-op consumer-members and employees who belong to VCP signed a petition calling on President Joe Biden to abandon any plans to breach the dams. The signatures were collected over a seven-day period and delivered to the White House.
Erin Kelly is a staff writer for NRECA.