Power lines from Bonneville Dam head in all directions in North Bonneville, Wash.
Don Ryan
The Bonneville Power Administration is among the federal agencies currently being gutted by Elon Musk at Pres. Donald Trump’s direction. The ostensible reason for federal government layoffs and buyouts is to save taxpayer dollars. In the case of the BPA, it’s funded by its ratepayers, not taxpayers, but that hasn’t stopped the departure of hundreds of the agency’s skilled and specialized workers. And additional staffers who were considered probationary were fired without notice last week. And that all has industry watchers, including two former heads of the BPA, sounding the alarm about the potential catastrophic impacts on the power grid and the people who rely on it. Steven Wright and Randy Hardy wrote a joint article in an industry newsletter Friday detailing those possible threats.
The BPA can be thought of as the backbone of the Northwest power grid. It sells wholesale electricity to the utilities, companies and other entities that sell power to residents all over the region. Sources include hydropower from Columbia River dams and the region’s only operating nuclear power plant. It also transmits energy through 15,000 miles of high voltage lines. The thousands of BPA employees perform tasks from engineering and line work to complex demand modeling and resource planning. That planning includes decisions around sources of power and how to prioritize and price the power. Energy consultant and former BPA administrator Randy Hardy joins us to discuss the details and possible impacts of the Elon Musk-led reductions on the Northwest.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today with the Bonneville Power Administration. It’s one of dozens of federal agencies being targeted by Elon Musk with the president’s support. The BPA is part of the U.S. Department of Energy but is not funded by taxpayers. It sells power to utilities and municipalities that’s generated at 31 dams and other sources. It also operates about 75% of the region’s high voltage transmission lines.
Over the last few weeks, hundreds of the agency’s skilled and specialized workers have taken early retirement, or accepted the so-called “fork in the road” buyout offer. Additional staff has been let go without notice last week. That has elected officials, industry watchers and former BPA leaders all sounding the alarm about the potential catastrophic impacts on the Northwest’s power grid and the millions of people who rely on it.
Randy Hardy is one of those leaders. He ran the BPA from 1991 to 1997, and now works as an energy consultant, he joins us now. Randy Hardy, welcome to Think Out Loud.
Randy Hardy: Thank you, Dave. I really appreciate it.
Miller: I gave the really short version of what the BPA does. What’s the fuller version of this hugely important, but in some ways under the radar agency?
Hardy: Yeah, well, as you pointed out, Bonneville markets power from the federal dams, Grand Coulee, and other dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers. The dams themselves are operated by the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation. But Bonneville has the responsibility for marketing the power from the dams and running the Northwest Transmission Grid. So about a third of the power that the Northwest consumes is marketed as hydropower and nuclear power, marketed by Bonneville.
Then, as you pointed out, the Bonneville owns 75% of the high voltage transmission. Which means from its Vancouver, Washington control center, it essentially runs the transmission grid. It keeps the lights on in the Northwest. When you’re running a transmission grid for the whole region, you have to balance resources and load every four seconds. That’s a complex job. It requires very specialized people with usually 20-25 years of training to do that. They’re among the most highly trained and skilled people in the organization. And one of the problems, just one, is that we’ve lost a number of those people. They didn’t get laid off, but they took early retirement or the “early out” program the Trump administration offered. And it’s very difficult to replace.
Miller: What does it mean in practice to operate the high voltage grid? What does the work entail?
Hardy: Well, it entails monitoring what your loads are at any given time throughout the region, as well as how much generation you have coming in, and matching those two. You’ve got a load desk, a generation desk, you have various positions and lots of data flowing in on a second by second basis. And you’ve got to constantly adjust the transmission system. You have to signal to the Corps and the Bureau for Coulee and the other dams how much water to release when, as well as work with the other utilities, like Portland General Electric and PacifiCorp, for the resources that they run, what output levels they should have, so that you keep the entire system in balance on a four second by four second basis.
Miller: This has been a moving target in recent days, the raw number or the percentage of total BPA employees who are no longer there through the combination of early retirement, or the fork in the road email, or actual terminations. Just in the last couple of days, we’ve heard that some subset of the people who were fired were quickly offered their jobs back. Based on the conversations you’ve had, what’s your best sense for the actual percentage of employees that we’re talking about, who no longer work at BPA?
Hardy: We started out back last Wednesday, when the judge released his hold on the early out program that the administration had offered. With everybody that was going to take that at Bonneville, that and an early retirement program, two separate parallel but similar programs, that was about 230 employees that had already sent their applications in. They were residing in the Office of Personnel Management in Washington D.C. Those people immediately got retired, as they requested. You had another 90 people for which Bonneville had offers out of jobs that they were required to rescind.
Miller: And that was because of the hiring freeze?
Hardy: Yeah, that’s because of the hiring freeze that’s part of this whole effort … they were withdrawn.
And then you had another 400 what are called probationary employees, which are the first year of your employment in a federal service. This is not unique to Bonneville, it’s for all federal agencies. You’re on a probationary status, meaning you do not have the normal protections of full-fledged civil service employees in the federal government. The theory of that is you’re evaluated during that first year, and if you measure up you become permanent, and if you don’t, you’re let go. Well, the Trump administration just decreed that all those folks should be fired.
So when you added that up, as of Wednesday or early Thursday of last week, Bonneville had lost 600 employees. That’s 20% of their workforce. Subsequent to that, and the outcry associated with the reliability damages that would occur in a variety of other problems that that would produce, the administration made a couple of changes. As of yesterday, we’re essentially at 420 positions that Bonneville is down. Out of a 3,100 person workforce, that’s a 14% reduction rate in their staff.
So that’s where they stand right now. They were able to get 300 roughly of the 400 probationary employees restored. They’ve still lost 100, and they frankly need those back. And when you adjust all of that, you end up with essentially a loss of 420 employees – a 14% reduction.
Miller: So the percentage is dramatic: 14%. But the jobs themselves is key. Our team at OPB talked to a few people at BPA who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of reprisal. One said this: “While the number of people leaving is a concern, the real problem is who is leaving. We have several mission critical employees with decades of institutional knowledge who’ve accepted the offer. I feel so defeated. Every day is an emotional roller coaster.”
Do you know right now if the kinds of mission critical roles that you were talking about earlier are still now unfilled?
Hardy: Yes. They are unfilled. Let me give you two groupings which are particularly critical. They’re not the only ones, but they’re probably the two main.
First, in the Vancouver control center, you have power dispatchers and hydro schedulers that operate the system on the four second by four second basis. Several of those dispatchers and schedulers have taken the early out program. Those folks are not immediately replaceable, period. You can work overtime with other staff, you can shift lesser qualified staff over to cover. But you are increasing the reliability risk of the system. Typically, Bonneville operates to less than 0.1% of unplanned outages. This will increase that percentage substantially. I don’t know whether it’s 1% or 2% or 5%, but it ain’t 0. And it isn’t even the 0.1% that we’re used to. That is an unacceptable increase in reliability risk, nationally …
Miller: Let me make sure … It’s the grid itself, so that regardless of your utility – because of the work done in that office – if less experienced people are doing it, you’re saying parts of the grid will just shut down? That is the fear?
Hardy: I’m saying parts of the grid may shut down if you have an unusual weather event. When you lose that kind of experience, the people you have replacing are doing their best. But they may not recognize individual anomalies in the system until it’s too late.
Let me give you an example. I put the lights out in California when I was administrator for a whole day. It was in August of ‘96. It was a very hot day. We were exporting much of our hydro to California, something like 7,500 megawatts. And one of our 230 kV lines sagged unexpectedly into a filbert tree in Eastern Oregon. And that triggered other lines starting to to relay out, and our dispatchers weren’t able to react fast enough to that.
Within a couple of minutes, we completely overloaded McNary Dam. The overspeed generators tripped. The lights went out, we lost a huge generation of McNary, that meant we were short all over the Northwest. And what happened is, the system automatically when something like that happens, it reduces to the load it can carry. The lights didn’t go out in the Northwest, but we shut down the Pacific Intertie, and the lights went out in California for virtually everybody. It took us a whole day to figure out what went wrong and to restore power.
That’s the kind of risk you don’t want to be exposed to, but that’s the kind of risk we now are exposed to, with this shortage of dispatchers.
Miller: The current BPA administrator John Hairston said that the Trump administration had “made it clear that it’s a national priority to increase the abundance of affordable, reliable and secure energy to strengthen the grid, and to enable the projects that will improve people’s lives.” What’s your response?
Hardy: That’s rhetoric. And so far, those expectations are going in exactly the wrong direction. This is my estimation, but Bonneville has $5 billion of planned transmission upgrades that it is proceeding with over the next probably five to 10 years. Those upgrades are needed to both meet the rising demand – particularly from data centers in Hillsboro and throughout the Northwest, east of the Cascades – as well as to enable utilities like Portland General Electric and Puget Sound Energy to meet their 80% clean energy goals by 2030.
So you have a lot of additional transmission that needs to be built. We haven’t built new transmission for 30 years in this region. We’ve been fortunate in that loads have grown, all the aluminum companies went out of business in the early 2000s, and we just reallocated that power to serve the load growth. So we didn’t have to build additional transmission. Well, now we do. Bonneville’s got a major program, but it can’t execute that program effectively unless it has somewhat more staff, instead of reducing staff by 420. So you’re now down to say 2,700 staff. You probably need to increase slightly from 3,100 to 3,200, with the key people, to be able to build that transmission and interconnect to all parts of the 13 western states, so you can directly access not just California power, but you can directly access the desert Southwest power in Nevada and Arizona, solar and conventional power, as well as go east.
Basically, what that will enable Bonneville to do is access whatever the cheapest resource is that’s operating anywhere in the western states more or less immediately, to get the lowest possible price. That’s a tremendous benefit to consumers. And if the administration was smart, they would back that transmission construction program. It will mean more reliable power, whether it’s fossil fuel, nuclear or renewables, because you’re much better interconnected to all of the resources in the 13 western states. And that will be a big win for them. But again, they’re largely ignorant of any of that. And it’s a top down, crammed down kind of approach to get a result that, ironically, is ludicrous, as I think Senator Wyden and/or Merkley have called it.
Because Bonneville’s self-financed! All of this cutting doesn’t save the U.S. taxpayer one dime, because Bonneville is funded through electricity rates that you pay, whether you’re in Portland, Seattle or Umatilla, to your individual utility. So that’s kind of where we are.
Miller: We talked with another one of the probationary employees at BPA who was fired. He didn’t want us to use his name, but he did raise an issue I haven’t seen too much in reporting: The provider of choice process that is underway now, which sets out long-term contracts with the agency’s customers, a lot of current contracts are up in 2028. What’s at stake in this process?
Hardy: Well, what’s at stake is utilities, mainly publicly-owned utilities which have preferential access to Bonneville hydropower, do they sign up for new 20-year contracts, or not? I think most of them still will. But that’s an important decision for them to make. And to a degree, you’re cutting staff so that they can’t provide the services that those publicly-owned utilities, like Eugene or Northern Wasco, are used to. Some of them may opt to try to go their own way and purchase power from the open market, which is for them a much riskier proposition than simply relying on Bonneville, given its size and degree of expertise. That’s the decision they’ll face over the next couple of years.
Miller: I mentioned a couple folks that we’ve talked to who wanted to stay anonymous. They mentioned fear of reprisals, fear of digital surveillance as some specific concerns. I’m curious what you’ve heard from current employees or people who’ve talked to them – I imagine you have a lot of contacts – in terms of morale at this agency?
Hardy: Morale’s in the toilet, as you might guess. People are scared. This is governance by fear and intimidation. That’s what the Trump administration is offering here. And naturally, people are afraid.
And the irony of this is, it’s hard for Bonneville to even describe what the impacts are, because you’re immediately perceived as being disloyal by the White House or the Department of Energy, and you’re subject to getting fired immediately. Even the current people in the Department of Energy can’t fully understand what’s going on, because it’s hard for Bonneville to communicate this in any public sense without being accused of being disloyal to the Trump administration or the Department of Energy, when they’re simply saying “this cut is going to produce that problem.”
The line between what is an honest discussion of real world impacts that the agency has to address, and exaggerating or crying wolf, is a very fine one. And where it’s drawn is highly dependent upon whoever’s hearing it. And this administration doesn’t want to hear bad news, they attack bad news, even when they’re the ones that created it. So that’s one of the major problems. If you’re an employee and you’re faced with that kind of attitude from your superiors, no wonder morale is taking a big hit. It’s a huge problem, and it’s a method of governance problem that’s certainly not unique to Bonneville. But as an operating agency which is responsible to keep the lights on in the Northwest, it has a particularly severe and risky impact.
Miller: Randy Hardy, thank you very much.
Hardy: Sure.
Miller: Randy Hardy is the former BPA administrator. He ran the BPA in the mid-1990s. He now works as an energy consultant. He joined us to talk about the impacts of staff resignations and terminations at the Bonneville Power Administration.
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