CEO’s Message – August 2023

A Great Day on the River

On the McNary Dam Tour article of this issue, you may have already seen the photos of our great day touring McNary Dam last month. All of the dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers are true engineering marvels that continue to evolve and improve with technological advances and provide the entire pacific northwest region with carbon-free, affordable electricity.

The electricity output is staggering, and currently irreplaceable. By late June of this year, McNary Dam alone had generated more than 1.9 million megawatt hours of electricity in 2023. That is enough for about 164,000 homes. All of the Federal dams on the Columbia River system together provide enough electricity to power eight cities the size of Seattle. Pacific Northwest historian Dorothy Johanson wrote in her book, Empire of the Columbia: A History of the Pacific Northwest, that nowhere in the West, or elsewhere in the nation for that matter, is hydropower as important as an instrument of economic change or factor in the electricity supply as in the Pacific Northwest.

But that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Since the 1930s, the cities and towns we live in and the farms and businesses that support us have grown up around the hydropower system. The navigational locks at all of the Columbia River dams have allowed barge traffic to carry this region’s bounty from Lewiston to Portland, carrying everything from grains, fertilizer, wood products, petroleum products and other goods. In 2021 alone, more than 5.6 million tons of commodities passed through the locks at McNary dam.

Fish passage and salmon restoration efforts are also an important chapter in the history of these dams. That story continues to be written, and hundreds of millions of dollars continue to be spent annually on salmon restoration, and not without success. According to NOAA Fisheries, the Columbia and Snake Rivers may now produce more juvenile salmon than they did prior to dams and development, when hatchery fish are included.

Lake Wallula, the waters that lie above McNary Dam between Howard Amon Park in Richland and Ice Harbor Dam on the Snake, as well as the almost 17,000 acres of public lands along the shore, supports wildlife habitat, numerous wildlife mitigation and protection projects, commercial-industrial development and beloved public recreation areas. There are 17 public boat launches along that stretch of river, as well as 2,400 acres of state and local parks.

All of this is just a good reminder of the fabulous gift to our way of life that these rivers have provided all of us. The growth of the Pacific Northwest, and specifically the Columbia Basin, one of the most agriculturally rich, environmentally friendly, and economically robust areas in this country, can be attributed in no small part to the hydroelectric dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers.

We would not recognize this area if we were to somehow catch a glimpse of things the way they were before the dams. The same could be said for a future envisioned without the dams.

Best,
Scott Peters, CEO