Congress has voted to block the federal government from selling off the transmission lines and other assets of the Bonneville Power Administration, as proposed by the Trump administration.
The ban is included in the appropriations bill that passed Monday as part of a $2.3 trillion package to provide relief from the coronavirus and to pay for government operations for fiscal 2021, which began Oct. 1
The bill still needs to be signed by President Trump.
Selling off BPA’s assets would increase costs for consumers and reduce the reliability of the electric grid, with rural communities the hardest hit, said industry leaders.
Most people in the Tri-Cities area rely on BPA electricity distributed to local utility districts.
Last May, U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Wash., was one of three leaders who sent a bipartisan letter to the House Committee on the Budget opposing changes to the BPA system.
BPA is part of the U.S. Department of Energy, but is self funded. It markets wholesale electric power, mostly from federal dams and the Energy Northwest nuclear power plant near Richland.
Money spent on infrastructure by BPA and three other federal Power Marketing Administrations are repaid with interest to the U.S. Treasury from electric rates set to fully recover taxpayer investments, the letter said.
BPA operates and maintains about three-quarters of the high-voltage transmission in its service territory, which includes Idaho, Oregon, Washington and some small parts of other nearby states.
In separate action, Sens. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., are calling on DOE to only consider candidates to head BPA who have knowledge of the Pacific Northwest and experience in utility management.
“In a break from norms, Department of Energy has not consulted Sens. Murray and Cantwell on potential BPA administrator candidates,” they said in a joint news release this week.
They said they were concerned that DOE is considering Gregory Zerzan, the current principal deputy solicitor at the Department of Interior and former lobbyist for Koch Industries, for the job, along with some internal candidates.
The senators said they would not support a political choice for the BPA administrator, which could lead to the privatization of BPA, they said.
