Megawatts by Microwave

In 1914 the Department of the Interior, through the Bureau of Reclamation, investigated the possibilities of developing the Columbia River. Thousands of arid but potentially fertile acres needed only water to become the Imperial Valley of the Northwest. Locked in the mountain ranges were valuable ores awaiting electricity to turn them into needed metals.

Two years later the State engineer of Oregon urged the development of the Bonneville site as a national-defense measure: he saw in the proposed power project a source of fertilizer in time of peace and nitrates in time of war. The dam also would completely drown out the Cascade Rapids and extend slack-water navigation some 40 miles eastward to The Dalles.

The Rivers and Harbors Act of 1925 directed the Secretary of War, through the Corps of Engineers, United States Army, to prepare and submit to the Congress an estimate of the cost of surveys, examinations, and investigations of all navigable streams and their tributaries where power development appeared feasible. (Q1)

It is difficult to succinctly explain why, exactly, the United States Army has spent much of its history involved in the construction of dams. It is partly an accident of history, partly the result of interagency federal politics, and entirely a product of American culture. In his book "Cadillac Desert," Marc Reisner examines the history of the American West's water control projects as a religious project, one animated less by practical needs than by a sense that domination of the West's rivers was destiny.

The Bureau of Reclamation, part of the Department of the Interior, was formed for that purpose. At the time, though, the Army had already been used to survey and improve rivers for nearly 100 years. They were not content to give it up. The result was a rivalry, one with several feints and blows before the two settled into their modern areas of control. For the Bureau of Reclamation, the Hoover Dam was their signature project. For the Corps of Engineers, the battle that would go down in history was the Columbia River Project.

The motivations for damming the Columbia were various. The Columbia was prone to flooding, which had caused damage and limited use of land along it. There was a great deal of land surrounding the Columbia that could be farmed, if the Columbia could be tapped for irrigation. Electricity, too, was a reason, although initially a somewhat secondary one. Perhaps the greatest reason, though, was simply economic: by the time that the major parts of the Columbia River Project were truly underway, the nation was in the throes of the Great Depression.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was already a fan of hydroelectricity. As governor of New York, he was exposed to the pioneering Niagara Falls power plant and pushed for other similar projects in that state. As President, his "New Deal" naturally incorporated hydropower as well. By 1934, he had formed a Regional Planning Commission that sketched out a series of dams along the Columbia, two of which would become the Grand Coulee and the Bonneville. These dams would produce a tremendous amount of electricity, and unlike in other similar Corps of Engineers projects to date, that power would not all be consumed by irrigation pumping. There was power to spare. To distribute that power, the Regional Planning Commission suggested an independent government agency on the model of the Panama Canal or the recently chartered Tennessee Valley Authority.

As an interim measure, the loosely defined Bonneville Project coordinated the civilian side of the Corps of Engineers project until 1938, when the Bonneville Dam was complete and the Grand Coulee was much of the way there. The Bonneville Dam captures little water in its reservoir, so while it does have flood control value, electrical production is its primary purpose. The dam's two powerhouses produce up to 1.2 GW, an impressive number for the 1930s but one that pales in comparison to the Grand Coulee's eventual (1970s) full capacity of nearly 7 GW. The Columbia River dams increased the electrical capacity of the Pacific Northwest by orders of magnitude; the numbers were significant even at a nationwide scale.

The bumper crop of electricity triggered a predictable controversy: what to do with government power? One camp favored public control of the resource, with the government marketing the power on some sort of equitable basis. The other favored private control, arguing that the output of the dams should be contracted entirely to private utilities like Portland General Electric (itself the scion of an important early hydroelectric project at Willamette Falls). In the New Deal political climate, the first camp won: the Columbia did not quite get a TVA, but Congress did charter the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), the first of what would come to be known as Power Marketing Agencies. Over the following decades, the BPA became part of the Department of Energy (DoE)—uncharacteristically, for the DoE, a part of it that actually generated and sold electricity. Well, technically, the Corps of Engineers generates it, and the BPA markets and distributes it.

In any case, starting in the late 1930s, the BPA was tasked with the construction of a network that could distribute power from Columbia River dams throughout the region—on an equitable, equal-rate basis often called the "postage stamp rate" that allowed rural coops to buy government-generated power at the same rate as the big city private utilities. The sudden bevy of power along the Columbia and the fair rates at which it could be obtained in great quantity led to an industrial revolution for the region, one that saw it as the seat of the American aluminum industry (with the Columbia Gorge producing something like 1/3rd of the nation's aluminum through to the 1970s) and that boosted the fate of hundreds of related industries (aerospace and, specifically, Boeing not least among them). BPA power has enduring influence today, with many towns on the Gorge (The Dalles, Boardman, Umatilla) disproportionately prominent on a map of the nation's data centers. AWS's us-west-2, for example, is a beneficiary of Columbia River dams and located near many of them—not just Bonneville, but the Dalles (1.8 GW), John Day (2.2 GW), McNary (1.1 GW), and more.

In marketing this power, the BPA faced a challenge: the dams are spread across a large area, as are the customers. Industrial customers, such as the Alcoa (Aluminum Company of America) smelter that opened in 1940 at Vancouver, Washington 1 were opening in rural areas where land was readily available, and an explicit goal of the Columbia River Project had been the extension of electricity to farmers and other rural industries. The concept of long-distance power transmission had been pioneered by an 1889 transmission line, the nation's first, between Willamette Falls at Oregon City and downtown Portland. Beginning in 1938, the BPA was tasked with expanding that concept across a region that would eventually span eight states.

The Master Grid

BPA's first administrator, J. D. Ross, presented a plan he called the BPA Master Grid. This ring-shaped network, made up of 230 kV long-distance transmission lines, would connect the dams not only to Portland and Seattle but to Pasco, Yakima, Spokane, Ellensburg, the Willamette Valley through to California, and the Oregon Coast. By 1945, the Master Grid covered three thousand "Circuit Miles" of transmission lines. It was the first integrated regional power grid in the United States, and would come to pioneer the market-based electricity pricing and distribution, independent system operators (ISOs), and pooling and wheeling agreements that form the modern US electrical infrastructure. The entire Western Interconnection, the unified power system that serves the US and Canada from the Rocky Mountains west, can be said to have crystallized outwards from the seed of the Bonneville Dam's switch yard.