Down the Mighty Columbia River, Where a Power Struggle Looms<br />In Sherman County, Ore., for example, southeast of The Dalles, President Trump won 72 percent of the vote,<br />and critics of Bonneville Power seem just about as prevalent because of how grid operators have incorporated, or not, the new rising force of wind energy into a system dominated by hydropower.<br />“When you privatize, what happens to the voice of the Indian people?”<br />PASCO, Wash. — While the idea of selling some or all of what the federal government built here is not new<br />— President Ronald Reagan floated the idea in the early 1980s — it’s a much different debate this time.<br />Wringing profits from a system that has provided electricity at cost would inevitably raise prices, critics of the idea<br />said, while supporters envision a streamlined grid open to innovations that government managers cannot imagine.<br />Now, the Trump administration has proposed rethinking the entire system, with a plan to sell the transmission network of wires and substations owned by the Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency<br />that distributes most of the Columbia basin’s output, to private buyers.<br />Native American tribal leaders said that the old river would never come back, but<br />that the federal government was now bound, through court decisions and treaties, to work with tribes going forward.<br />Nearly half of the nation’s hydropower electricity comes from more than 250 hydropower dams<br />that were built on the Columbia and its tributaries — a vast and complex arc of industry and technology that touches tens of millions of lives across the West every day.
