Two former Bonneville Power Administration directors say that President Donald Trump’s staff reductions to the agency dramatically increase the risk of power outages, including for North and Northeast Portland.
“Electricity outages create significant risk to human health and safety” and the possibility of outages has increased since Trump abruptly reduced BPA staff by nearly 20% last spring, wrote Randy Hardy and Steve Wright for the NewsDate, a utility industry newsletter.
The BPA is a federal agency that markets power from all the federally owned hydroelectric projects in the Pacific Northwest. It also owns 75% of the transmission lines used by Portland General Electric, which covers N/NE Portland.
“Normally BPA power is delivered with an outage probability of less than one percent. These changes will increase that probability dramatically,” Hardy and Davis wrote.
The BPA staff cuts are unwelcome news for a power industry already reeling from the unexpected emergence of new AI generating data centers that use enormous amounts of power. Making matters worse, the BPA is having difficulty keeping skilled staff from leaving for other employers, said Angus Duncan, who formerly represented Oregon on the NW Power Planning Council.
Orders by Trump’s then-director of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Elon Musk to gut BPA staff earlier this year could so harm the agency’s power generation and transmission capacity that utilities such as PGE might seek emergency customer rate increases next spring.
The Oregon Legislature passed the FAIR Energy Act last year that regulates when PGE and other privately-owned utilities like PacifiCorp can seek rate increases.
New state law prevents residential rate hikes in winter
Utilities used to be able to ask the Oregon Public Utility Commission for emergency rate increases during cold winter months when electrical demand spikes, but a new state law now requires them to wait until warmer spring weather. Nearly 70,000 households behind on their bills were disconnected by private utilities last year, according to the Oregon Citizens’ Utilities Board. The group claimed that winter-time rate hikes were directly related to the disconnections (OPB).
The FAIR Energy Act now requires that rate hikes may not take place between Nov. 1 and March 31.
PGE spokesperson Drew Hanson could not comment on internal BPA staffing issues, but said PGE is required to ensure power delivery to customers and said they are doing “due diligence to meet customer needs” and avoid any possible outages this winter.
While PGE has a large supply of power from its own sources including hydro, coal and solar, it also buys BPA power and regularly uses the agency’s transmission lines for power delivery to customers.
The Trump administration’s recent cancellation of $7.6 billion in grants for hundreds of clean energy projects in 16 states, all of which voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election, could also impact PGE and N/NE Portland ratepayers.
Projects set for cancellation include a $250 million joint project between the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Spring Reservation in Central Oregon and PGE to upgrade transmission lines that connect power from Deschutes River hydroelectric plants to utility customers in the Willamette Valley.
Hanson said that as of this week, the Tribe had not received an official cancellation notice and hopes to save the project.