Category – Energy

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.

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.

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.

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).

In a wide-ranging conversation, BPA Administrator John Hairston presented to the Council during its July meeting on topics including a new record high for energy demand that BPA reached earlier this month, and a new agreement in principle on amendments to the Columbia River Treaty between the U.S. and Canada.

June's Council meeting in Helena featured presentations by Montana electric co-operatives, Bonneville Power Administration, and Power Division staff.

The U.S. government is modifying hydropower operations on the lower Snake and lower Columbia rivers, providing more hours of spill in the spring and curtailing spill operations in August. In preparation for an upcoming adequacy assessment, Council staff incorporated these changes in modeling to understand the impact to power generation.

Power demand forecasts are showing significant increases in the Pacific Northwest over the next five years, and the Council is closely monitoring the region’s progress on key targets from its 2021 Power Plan and analyzing whether that will ensure that the power supply is keeping pace.