House Republicans review agreement they say will remove four hydroelectric dams, Dems deny plans

Republican House members held a hearing Tuesday to examine an agreement that they say provides a path to remove four dams on the Snake River in Washington, replacing the hydroelectric power the dams produce with power from wind and solar sources.

The Republicans on the House Subcommittee on Energy, Climate, and Grid Security say this agreement was developed behind closed doors in consultation with radical environmental groups without any input from actual electricity providers, who are concerned about power reliability should the hydroelectric power be removed from the grid.

Rep. Cathy Rodgers, R-Wash., chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said that the Biden administration had worked for two years in secret with a select group of stakeholders in order to settle decades-long litigation on the issue of the dams’ impact on salmon populations in the Columbia River basin. “The agreement was released last month, and I am deeply concerned. It advances efforts to remove the four Lower Snake River dams,” Rodgers said.

Permission to do something they "don't plan" to do.

Democrats on the committee argued that Republican members were misrepresenting the agreement.

Rep. Diana DeGrett, D-Colo., asked for a hearing that didn’t rely on “misinformation and fear mongering.”  The agreement, she said, is not a plan to remove the four dams.

“That's simply not true. Here's the reality. The agreement reasserts that only Congress can authorize the removal of the Snake River dams, and doesn't mandate us to do anything,” DeGrett said.

The tribes and environmental groups say that the dams are the primary cause of Snake River salmon population declines, and salmon fishing is an important part of the tribes’ religious and cultural practices. Jeremy Takala, who serves on the Yakama Nation’s Tribal Council, testified that recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the tribes’ treaty fishing rights. That includes, he said, “the right to actually catch fish and not just dip our nets in empty waters without salmon.”

For nearly 30 years, a coalition of environmental groups and tribal organizations have challenged the federal government’s management plans for the Columbia River system’s dams and hydropower facilities in federal courts.

Janet Coit, assistant administrator Fisheries at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, testified that the agreement was an attempt to move the issue out of the courtroom into something more collaborative. This would provide more certainty, she said, to the process.

“We wanted to get away from the unpredictability of court orders determining how the system will be operated, and into a predictable situation where we work together towards these multiple, multiple goals of recovering salmon and achieving other system goals,” Coit said.

Keeping the lights on

The dams provide 3 gigawatts of hydroelectric power capacity. While Congress would need to authorize and appropriate funds for the removal of the dams, the agreement the Biden administration developed with the tribes directs the Department of Energy to support tribally sponsored clean energy projects to replace lost power generated by the dams, should Congress authorize their removal. Three gigawatts delivered for a month is enough to power approximately 2.4 million homes.

Jim Matheson, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, called the agreement an “ill conceived” plan that was “brokered in secret without contributions from electric utilities.” Matheson added that “[i]t does threaten electric reliability, and also violates in a fundamental way the trust communities in the Northwest put in the federal government.”

He explained that hydroelectric power provides baseload energy that can be ramped up and down as needed. This makes it ideal to backup wind and solar power, which are at best intermittent and can only provide electricity under the right weather conditions.

He said the recent cold snap earlier this month demonstrated how critical the dams’ energy generation is to the grid. Between January 11 and 13, wind production in the system dropped by 94%, but hydroelectric power was available to meet demand. The power kept “the lights on and furnaces and space heaters running during the extreme cold event when electricity was needed most. Wind simply didn't perform and the dams did perform,” Matheson said.

He said that while the agreement acknowledges that the removal of the dams would require an act of Congress, the word “breaching,” meaning the removal of a dam, is mentioned more than two dozen times in the agreement, along with language about replacing the power the dams provide.

“Why are we talking about replacement power unless it assumes the dams are going to be breached?” Matheson said. He continued, saying that important stakeholders were left out of important stages of the settlement agreement. While there were listening sessions at the front end of the process, and people were asked to submit comments, he said that during the last several months, these other stakeholders -- like those who will actually shoulder the burden on maintaining electric grid reliability -- were shut out.

“The people whose job is to keep the lights on were kept in the dark,” Matheson said.

At the hearing, Rep. Rodgers held up a stack of paper she said was a collection of letters by 40 individuals and organizations who were not included in the final months of the agreement negotiations. “This process was never about getting results for endangered salmon. It was a reckless pursuit of an activist agenda,” Rodgers said. Last week a group of House Republicans, led by Rodgers and Rep. Dan Newhouse, also of Washington, introduced legislation that would prohibit the federal government from removing the four dams.

“The Biden Administration has crossed the line with its blatant, hypocritical assault on the Lower Snake River Dams," Newhouse said in a statement.