Together, those four dams produce more than 30,000 gigawatt-hours of power. That’s enough electricity to power nearly 3 million average U.S. homes.
Bonneville is the closest dam to the mouth of the Columbia River and has the potential to power about 900,000 homes at any given time, tour guide and Corps Park Ranger Meg Sleeper said as reporters looked at rumbling turbines.
The 86-year-old dam was constructed as a part of the New Deal’s Depression-era Public Works Administration project. It has two powerhouses, a lock to allow ships to pass, a spillway and two fish ladders.
Dan Patla, currently a senior turbine engineer at the Corps’ Hydroelectric Design Center, has worked for the Corps for two decades. He focuses on how to make the giant turbines that generate power as the river turns them as efficient as possible.
“Ultimately, I think everybody wins when we are able to generate electricity and also have the highest passage efficiency,” Patla said of fish making it past the dam.
Standing above a fish ladder, he said the Corps has done many studies to determine what parts of the dam’s turbines kill fish.
“We’ve learned from that, and we know how to design to try to minimize that,” Patla said.
Down in the ladder viewing room, watching Chinook, steelhead, lamprey and other fish through thick windows, Sleeper pointed to examples of that type of work in the dam at large. She pointed out a lamprey resting box.
“We can see them with all their noses sticking out,” she said.
The ladders, Sleeper explained, were designed with only fish in mind. The fast-moving water and sharp bends in the ladders can be challenging for lamprey. But small boxes on the bottom of the ladder and bypasses aim to make it more hospitable to the important, if unusual-looking Columbia River fish species.
Efforts like these to mitigate the ways Columbia River Basin dams harm fish highlight an increasing tension: Washington needs more clean energy to meet its mandate of cutting fossil-fuel-generated power from its grid by 2045, but dams like these have also jeopardized salmon species’ survival in the Columbia.
Compounding the issue, the Department of the Interior report acknowledged federal dams in the basin “disproportionately harmed” Native nations. That included flooding some tribes’ homelands, as well as altering the river for economic ends that harmed their treaty-protected rights to fish.
The report notes the impacts are ongoing.
The report came after a series of actions from the Biden administration, which intervened to pause decadeslong legal battles over the future of some dams in the basin amid growing calls for dam removal on the Snake River.
In December, the Biden administration announced a 10-year, $1 billion partnership with tribes and states to “restore wild salmon, expand clean energy production, increase resilience and provide energy stability to the Columbia River Basin.”
The partnership includes an agreement that increases the amount of water that skips Bonneville’s turbines, instead flowing over the spillway and increasing chances of survival for young salmon headed out to sea. But that also reduces electricity production.
