Northwest electricity customers are again being told not to worry.

In litigation over Columbia Basin salmon, federal agencies began spilling more water last month to comply with a federal court order, sending more water over spillways rather than through power-generating turbines. According to court filings, the order will cost Bonneville Power Administration customers over $100 million a year and cut hydropower output by 1,000 megawatts in August and 500 in September.

That’s enough clean energy to power a sizable city. That’s on top of the hundreds of millions BPA customers fund each year for salmon and wildlife. Despite all this, spill supporters share a familiar message: the system can absorb it, costs are manageable, and reliability will hold.

The organizations responsible for keeping the lights on tell a much different story.

Last October, North American Electric Reliability Corporation President Jim Robb described grid risks as a “five-alarm fire,” citing dwindling reliable power supply, extreme weather, and permitting delays outpacing demand growth.

The Western Electricity Coordinating Council’s 2025 assessment, released this January, found that even in a best-case scenario, blackout risk appears across the decade, with the Northwest among the highest-risk regions.

Historically, only about two-thirds of planned resources come online on schedule, meaning hours at risk could climb into the thousands.

In January 2024, an Arctic blast drove the Northwest into a reliability emergency. Wind and solar output fell, dams boosted their output, and blackouts were narrowly averted. The next step would have been to shed load by cutting power to homes, schools and businesses.

Against that backdrop, it defies logic to claim that reducing hydropower even further will have only minor consequences. The case largely rests on a 2018 Northwest Energy Coalition study arguing the four lower Snake River dams could be replaced for a dollar a month per household, a figure that quietly depended on continued natural-gas generation to stabilize the grid.

Northwest Energy Coalition later championed Washington’s Clean Energy Transformation Act and Oregon’s House Bill 2021. These laws phased out the very fossil generation its earlier replacement math depended on. The dollar-a-month figure kept circulating as if nothing had changed.

The laws and the grid changed, but the talking points did not.

Every megawatt of hydropower lost, whether to dam removal or spill, must be replaced by something else at a time the region is already facing shortages.

E3’s new two-phase study of the Northwest grid projects a shortfall in dependable electricity of 9 gigawatts by 2030. 

Commissioned by the Public Generating Pool and fourteen utility and power-sector sponsors, the study finds that gap is larger than Oregon’s entire average electricity demand, driven by data centers, building electrification, and electric vehicles. The shortfall widens to 14 to 18 gigawatts by 2035.

The Phase 2 analysis, released this month, quantifies the costs. 

Even before adding clean energy policy, retail rates are projected to exceed inflation by 36% to 47% from rising demand and insufficient supply. Meeting Washington’s 2045 mandate without emerging technologies, such as small modular nuclear reactors, nuclear fusion, hydrogen, or carbon capture, would nearly triple today’s retail rate.

E3 calls the pathway infeasible without at least one clean, firm and dispatchable technology at commercial scale. To weather a cold snap, it must be one capable of sustained output over many hours.

Only one such resource exists in the region today. It’s hydropower, and the court just ordered us to use less of it.

Meanwhile, E3’s own least-cost pathway depends on new natural gas peaking plants – the very resources Washington’s climate law phases out.

Citing the same findings, The Seattle Times editorial board warned the study “should alarm every Washingtonian,” and urged Gov. Bob Ferguson and state lawmakers to build reliability backstops into the clean energy transition. They are right, and if Washington policymakers don’t want natural gas, we’ll need every megawatt of hydropower we’ve got.

None of this makes salmon less important. They are woven into Northwest identity and are profoundly important to Native American tribes’ heritage, culture, and economy. But we can’t have an honest discussion about tradeoffs if we aren’t honest about what the tradeoffs are.

The evidence is clear. The region is running out of dependable electricity, and the dollar-a-month story cannot survive modern scrutiny.

Customers of Seattle City Light, Snohomish PUD, Tacoma Power, and utilities across the Northwest – especially low-income households stretched by utility bills – deserve policy grounded in that evidence, not fairytales the region has since outgrown.

Kurt Miller is CEO and executive director of the Northwest Public Power Association, representing more than 150 consumer-owned electric utilities across the western United States and British Columbia. He lives in Vancouver, Washington.

This story is republished from the Washington State Standard, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet that provides original reporting, analysis and commentary on Washington state government and politics.