Energy Northwest

About the Book

The nation is currently at the beginning of a serious energy crisis. For the electrical utility industry, it is the most serious crisis since the 1970s, with a shortfall in generating capacity and skyrocketing fuel prices. At the same time, legislation to deregulate the industry is stuck in Congress; rolling blackouts are plaguing California and threatening the Northwest; elected officials are frozen by ideology over good governance - and there is no end in sight. How did we get in this condition?

In the Pacific Northwest, the answer to this and many related questions can be found in Energy Northwest: A History of the Washington Public Power Supply System. This work documents the joint operating agency made up of publicly owned utilities that became Energy Northwest. But for most of its existence the agency was known as the Washington Public Power Supply System - WPPSS, or, simply the Supply System. Its founders were veterans of years of conflict between their public utilities and the powerful private utilities of the region. Public power leaders hoped to provide their ratepayers reliable and affordable electricity, at the cost of production, for the future. Founded in 1957, the agency got into business by building and operating a small hydroelectric plant called the Packwood Lake Project located in the majestic Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Then in 1966, WPPSS built the Hanford Generating Project, a power facility that used the steam created by the N-reactor, a plutonium producing defense plant on the Hanford Reservation 25 miles north of Richland, Washington. The Supply System ran the plant for 20 years before the N-reactor shut down for good, taking away the source of steam from Hanford Generating Project.

As Hanford Generating Project began to churn out power, in the late 1960s, the region initiated a planning process to build more thermal plants, since no more hydroelectric dams would be built. This ambitious effort - the Hydro-Thermal Power Plan - enthusiastically sponsored by the federal power marketing agency Bonneville Power Administration, envisioned up to 20 nuclear and coal powered plants in the Northwest. This frenzied effort was in response to the Energy Crisis of 1974 and the reliance on an outmoded energy forecasting system that projected power blackouts and economic chaos. Two nuclear power plants were eventually built and operated - Portland General Electric´s Trojan plant, near Ranier, Oregon, and WPPSS´s WNP-2, at Hanford. Others were planned, at Pebble Springs near Arlington, Oregon, and in the Skagit Valley in Northwest Washington, which were abandoned early on.

But the major effort went into five nuclear power plants to be built and operated by the Washington Public Power Supply System. The Joint Power Planning Council, representing all the region´s utilities and hosted by Bonneville, and the Public Power Council asked WPPSS to build these plants and build them quickly. Two were to be located on a forested hilltop near Satsop, in western Washington, and three at the remote Hanford Reservation. Of these only WNP-2 (now renamed Columbia Generating Station) was completed. Since it began commercial operation in 1985, the plant produces 1,150 net megawatts of electricity at full power, enough to serve the greater Seattle area. The other four were mothballed and later terminated in various stages of completion after years of construction woes and stunning cost overruns. The ratepayers of the Northwest continue to pay off the revenue bonds for three of those - WNP-1, WNP-3, and Columbia Generating Station - through a financial arrangement with Bonneville. The Supply System defaulted on the bonds for the other two - WNP-4 and WNP-5 - to the tune of $2.25 billion, the largest municipal bond default in U.S. history to that time.

The aftermath of this disaster was extremely damaging, not only for those bondholders who received only pennies on the dollar after years

About the Author

Gary K. Miller spent over two years researching and writing Energy Northwest: A History of the Washington Public Power Supply System. He traveled throughout the Northwest to conduct interviews and archival research, working out of Energy Northwest’s Columbia Generating Station, the only nuclear power plant within a thousand miles. Miller holds BA and MA degrees in history from Portland State University and is the author of Lighting the Way: A History of Franklin County Public Utility District, 1947-1997. A retired Air National Guard Chief Master Sergeant, Miller is also a veteran of two tours in the U.S. Peace Corps and worked as an elections monitor in Bosnia in 1997. His wide experience and high standards of scholarship bring a unique perspective to this fascinating history. With energy shortages reported daily, the publication of this work could not be timelier. Gary Miller lives and works in Richland, Washington.