Guest Opinion | Open letter on breaching Snake River dams

||| FROM JANET ALDERTON |||

Governor Inslee and Senator Murray,

Thank-you for caring about the struggling Southern Resident Killer Whales. Thank you for your draft report about the issues surrounding breaching of the four Lower Snake River dams.

Please consider my thoughts on the draft report and the massive misinformation campaign to maintain the status quo. 

Northwest River Partners is especially active in disseminating alarming misinformation. They commissioned a study that was released just two weeks before the deadline for comments on your draft report. Their study presents exaggerated and alarmist conclusions that bear no relation to reputable studies, such as those by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. 

The Technology Quarterly of The Economist (June 25, 2022) examines The Energy Transition in great depth. On page 5, Empowered Demand -The People’s Power:

“Customers can set preferences as to what they need charged up and when, as they do in a new scheme offered by Octopus Energy, a British provider. After that, they let the system do what it wants – an approach the company says can, among other things, lower the cost of charging an electric vehicle by 75%. Such savings by consumers equate, at some point, with savings for suppliers in terms of electricity they did not have to ship down congested transmission lines.

An in-depth study carried out by America’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory puts numbers to some of the possibilities. It analyzed the impact of using dynamic price signals to automatically incentivize and coordinate a variety of Distributed Energy Resources on a theoretical grid the size of Texas. Operation stabilized, loads were lowered, household-power prices dropped by 10% to 17%. The need for transmission, distribution and generating infrastructure fell.

In Britain a new regime for distribution-systems operators means that utilities will be able to solicit Distributed Energy Resources via open and transparent “flexibility” markets. This should allow them to provide better services without having to add generating or transmission capacity… 

The check on such things is not because of a lack of interest in greening; it is because of opposition from incumbents. …

Jesse Morris of Energy Web complains that, in California and Hawaii, utilities are allowed to “simply prevent -either directly or via prohibitively high interconnection fees – Distributed Energy Resources from being added to the grid.”

This is all quite damning. Similar obstruction is happening in Washington State. 

One of our issues in Washington State is congested high power transmission lines. After the four Lower Snake River dams are breached, transmission capacity used by these dams will be freed up for existing solar and wind energy.

Save the Salmon! Save the Orcas! Honor Our Salmon Treaties!