Columbia River Focus

The Columbia River, long a source of hydropower for the Pacific Northwest, will play a significant role as the region develops new sources of energy, too.

The fog-drenched forests, salt marshes and rainy harbors of the Columbia River estuary at Astoria seem far removed from the dry windswept hills and canyon lands east of the Columbia Gorge, but these dissimilar environments are intimately connected by the mighty Columbia River. The Columbia Gorge marks the river’s passage through the Cascades Range, which divides the Pacific Northwest into rainy western, and dry eastern halves. The river and the gorge have long been a focus for human activity, since the days when native fishermen first fashioned nets to dip Chinook salmon out of the falls on their spawning migrations. Salmon still migrate throughout the Columbia and its 259,000 square miles of tributary watersheds. One species, sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka), makes a tremendous journey, travelling nearly 900 miles from the mouth of the Columbia to reach its spawning grounds in Idaho’s Sawtooth Valley, more than a mile above sea level.

      Human activity has expanded the use of the river far beyond fishing. For half a century a series of federal dams, locks and pools have kept the river open to ocean commerce as far upstream as Lewiston, Idaho. Federal dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers are the main source of electricity for much of the Pacific Northwest; all told, there are more than 400 dams, large and small, on the Columbia and its tributaries, providing water for irrigation and hydroelectricity throughout the region.

      A few miles east of Portland, the Columbia Gorge acts like a huge pump, funneling winds from east to west, or west to east, for days at a time. On the Oregon side of the river, the wind streams across Sherman County, a high saddle of land perched between rugged canyons a few miles above the gorge. Wheat grows on the hills, but wind dominates the landscape. The signposts of an emerging industry, wind turbines dominate Sherman County’s skyline.

      Each graceful tower stands about 79 meters tall and bears a triple-bladed rotor. The largest sweep a patch of sky of about 29,000 square meters, an area the equivalent of 5½ football fields. With their blades turning slowly against the pressure of the wind, changing their pitch to extract energy from the wind as efficiently as possible, the turbines produce from 1.5 to 3.2 megawatts (mw). They are so large that a line of them on a ridge above the river, as seen from the perspective of a vehicle traveling west on Interstate 84 on the Oregon side of the Columbia River, shrinks the apparent size of the mighty Columbia River canyon from vast, to something much smaller.

      Driven by a regional demand for an energy source that does not contribute to global warming, wind has emerged as a significant addition to the regional power supply, according to the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), which brokers the sale of power throughout a four-state region. The BPA buys electricity from 31 federal dams, a nuclear plant, and from investor-owned wind power projects and sells about one third of all the electricity used in the Pacific Northwest. Its customers include 140 public and private utilities in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. The BPA cooperates with the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, a power-planning board created by the Northwest Power Act, and charged with providing an “adequate, efficient, economical and reliable” regional power supply. The council considers the environmental costs of various energy resources as well as their financial costs. It also considers energy efficiency a generating resource.

      The BPA began adding wind to its power supply in the 1990s as concerns about global warming grew, but by 2005 the amount of wind power being produced barely topped 250 mw. Things began to change when Montana, Washington and Oregon each approved legislation requiring utilities to use more wind-generated power. Spurred by the states’ actions, the utilities began demanding more green energy from the BPA. Last year, 28 utilities signed agreements with the BPA to buy 6,410 mw of electricity. Requests for wind power made up almost three quarters of the total. (BPA, 2009.)

      Some other regional power suppliers rely more heavily on fossil fuels. For example, Portland General Electric (PGE), which supplies electricity to 1.6 million people in 52 Oregon cities including Salem and Portland (about 43 percent of the state’s population), depends on coal-fired and natural gas for half of its generating capacity. PGE owns or buys the balance of its power from wind and hydropower producers, and owns shares of coal-fired generating plants in eastern Oregon and eastern Montana. (PGE, 2009.)

      At last count the BPA had connected 13 wind projects to its transmission grid. The agency has also purchased about 270 mw of long-term wind-generated electricity – enough to supply 175,000 homes, but because wind doesn’t always blow, the amount translates into about 15 mw of continually-available, dependable power. The BPA now transmits about 1,500 mw of wind energy produced by other suppliers, and expects to be moving as much as 3,000 mw by the end of 2009. The Northwest Power and Conservation Council estimates adding 5,000 mw of wind power over the next 20 years.

      By reducing the overall amount of greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels to meet the Pacific Northwest’s power needs, the wind that blows across the Sherman County hills may indirectly help to ameliorate some of the effects of global warming – like rising sea levels, migration of marshes, more frequent storms and erosion, or loss of valuable habitats like freshwater marshes, tide flats and shorelines – that threaten northwest estuaries including the Columbia estuary. The river knits together a vast region marked by different climates, dissimilar environments and cultural values, and different economic needs. Producing and using energy that does not contribute to global warming, however, is a theme that potentially can bind the upper and lower river communities in common cause.