Bonneville Power Administration

The Bonneville Project, named for the then-new Bonneville Dam, was established by an act of Congress that was signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on August 20, 1936. The federal agency was created to market electricity from the Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams based on the model of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). It would provide a flat rate for customer utilities and use revenue from these sales to pay off the bonds used by the federal government to finance the construction of dams in the Pacific Northwest. The agency's name was changed to the Bonneville Power Administration in 1940. Attempts to replace the BPA with a Columbia Valley Authority that more closely resembled the TVA were made in the 1940s and 1950s, but were ultimately unsuccessful.

BPA's first industrial sale was to Alcoa in January 1940, to provide 32,500 kilowatts of power. This, and the following 162,500 kilowatt order, led to complaints of the Bonneville Power Act's anti-monopoly clause. The cheap price of aluminum from Alcoa helped aluminum sales grow in the post-World War II market.

Overly optimistic estimates of future electricity consumption by BPA in the 1960s led the agency to guarantee some bonds for the disastrous Washington Public Power Supply System nuclear power project. Out of five nuclear power plants started (WNP-1 and WNP-4, WNP-3 and WNP-5), only WNP-2 was completed. BPA is still making payments on three of the abandoned plants. In 2003, BPA's debt for the nuclear project totaled $6.2 billion.

In 1973, the BPA commissioned TRW Inc. to write software for the PDP-10 mainframe computer that managed the agency's power grid; Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote the software for the monitoring system, which remained in operation until its replacement in 2013.

In 2014, the BPA Library discovered a collection of old films made by the agency and began posting digital versions of them on the agency's website. Included in the collection is the award-winning documentary "River of Power" which covers the Agency's history from its beginning to the present.

The BPA gives its name to the BPA Trail in Federal Way, Washington, a walking trail built beneath power transmission lines.

In 2025, the BPA was impacted by mass firings of federal workers by the Department of Government Efficiency.

Operations

The power generated on BPA's grid is sold to public utilities, private utilities, and industry on the grid. The excess is sold to other grids in Canada, California and other regions. Because BPA is a public entity, it does not make a profit on power sales or from providing transmission services. BPA also coordinates with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to regulate flow of water in the Columbia River and to carry out environmental projects such as salmon restoration.

Although BPA is part of the DOE, it is self-funded and covers its costs by selling its products and services at cost. The BPA provides about 28% of the electricity used in the region. BPA transmits and sells wholesale electricity in eight western states: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California. Its minimum wholesale rate is 3.49 cents per kilowatt-hour; the BPA generated $4.72 billion in operating revenue in 2022.

BPA now markets the electricity from thirty-one federal hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River and its tributaries, as well as from the Columbia Generating Station, a nuclear plant located on the Hanford Site in eastern Washington. BPA has more than 15,000 circuit miles (24,140 circuit km) of electrical lines and 261 substations in the Pacific Northwest and controls approximately 75 percent of the high-voltage (230 kV and higher) transmission capacity in the region. 87 percent of the agency's sustained peak capacity (11,680 MW) is generated from hydroelectricity.

BPA also maintains connection lines with other power grids. It connects to the California high-voltage transmission system by Path 66, which consists of the two 500 kV AC lines of the Pacific AC Intertie, plus a third 500 kV AC line of the California-Oregon Transmission Project (COTP) (managed by the Balancing Authority of Northern California). Together these three lines are operated as the California-Oregon Intertie (COI) (managed by the California Independent System Operator CAISO). An additional DC ±500 kV line, the Pacific DC Intertie, links BPA's grid at the Celilo Converter Station near The Dalles, Oregon to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) grid 800 miles (1,300 km) away at the Sylmar Converter Station in Los Angeles.