News

During its November meeting in Portland, the Council heard briefings on new regional, West-wide, and national planning efforts underway that aim to get new transmission line projects built faster and help states and utilities meet upcoming clean energy goals in the 2030s and 2040s.

At its October meeting in Portland, the Council heard a primer on what climate change data staff will use to help develop the Ninth Power Plan and reviewed recent trends in the data.

BPA and IDFG reported on the success of the project, with plans for ongoing stewardship.

As load forecasts show significant growth in the next five years due to electric vehicles, data centers, and the tech sector in the Pacific Northwest, new data shows key progress on a critical solution: acquiring cost-effective energy efficiency.

For the second time in 2024, the Pacific Northwest has set a new record for peak seasonal power demand. A heatwave that hit the region in early July sent demand on the grid surging to 33,300 MW, which is slightly higher than the previous summer peak of 33,000 MW set during the June 2021 heat dome. In a cold snap that hit in January 2024, the Northwest set the record for winter peak demand at 35,500 MW.

Representatives from BPA, the Lower Columbia Estuary Partnership, the Columbia Land Trust, and the Columbia River Estuary Taskforce presented on habitat restoration projects and ongoing research in the estuary.

While producing the 2021 Power Plan, Council power system analysts kept bumping up against limitations to their old computer models’ ability to do long-term load forecasting among other essential tasks in power planning. To address this issue, in 2023 staff contracted with Itron, a company offering energy forecasting software tools, to upgrade the Council’s long-term load forecasting.

Last September, quagga mussel larvae were detected in the Snake River near Twin Falls, Idaho during routine monitoring conducted by the Idaho State Department of Agriculture, the first time they had been found in the basin. Keeping them out of the basin will be a year-round, full-time effort.

Members of the federal negotiating team presented to the Council on the recently released agreement in principle to modernize the Columbia River Treaty.

The Council has published its 2029 Resource Adequacy Assessment. The Council’s annual adequacy assessment is a five-year test of the power plan’s resource strategy to ensure that it will provide an adequate future power supply. This report summarizes the aggregate regional power supply’s adequacy for the 2029 operating year (October 2028 through September 2029).