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Meet Our Participants: BPA
Published: June 05, 2008:Author: ColumbiaGrid Staff
The featured participant in this edition of GridLines hardly needs an introduction. The Bonneville Power Administration has been a fixture in the Northwest for over 70 years. One of ColumbiaGrid’s original members, BPA owns and operates over 15,100 circuit miles of high-voltage transmission line and related facilities, including 259 substations.
BPA, headquartered in Portland, OR, was created by an Act of Congress in 1937 to market power from dams on the Columbia River. Today, the agency sells power from 31 federal dams, one nuclear plant, and several non-federal projects, including wind farms. Its service territory includes Idaho, Oregon, Washington and western Montana, and small parts of eastern Montana, California, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. BPA has 148 wholesale power customers and 339 transmission customers.
The agency began building transmission lines in the 1930s. The first line was three miles long and connected Bonneville Dam to Cascade Locks. Major construction from the 1940s through the 1960s resulted in a system that covered most parts of BPA’s service territory. The system today includes a regional transmission network, as well as Interties that connect with other utilities’ lines in Canada, California, the Southwest and eastern Montana.
In its mission statement, BPA affirms its commitment to providing “a transmission system that is adequate to the task of integrating and transmitting power from federal and non-federal generating units, providing service to BPA’s customers, providing interregional interconnections, and maintaining electrical reliability and stability.” To fulfill its mission, the agency continually plans and improves its transmission lines and facilities.
BPA’s transmission services organization develops plans and options for network transmission, interconnections and control and data systems. In addition to upgrading infrastructure to shore up the system and assure reliability, BPA’s transmission planners are responding to new challenges, including compliance with mandatory national reliability standards and open-access transmission protocols. The agency is also working with others in the Northwest on plans to lay the groundwork – both physically and in terms of policy – for integrating substantial quantities of wind generation into the transmission grid.
Since 2000, BPA has invested $1.2 billion in major new high-voltage transmission lines to ensure reliability. Examples include the Kangley-Echo Lake, Grand Coulee-Bell and Schultz-Wautoma 500-kV lines. BPA also has been working to shore up the existing system by aggressively addressing congestion, introducing efficiency improvements to “squeeze” the most out of the existing system and seeking nonwires alternatives. Currently, BPA is conducting a Network Open Season to better manage the queue of customers wishing to secure long-term firm capacity on BPA's network transmission system.
