Now, the Trump administration has proposed rethinking the entire system, with a plan to sell the transmission network of wires and substations owned by the Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency that distributes most of the Columbia basin’s output, to private buyers. High-voltage transmission lines shoot south to California.
The Space Needle in Seattle uses Columbia River electricity to slowly spin tourists in its sky-view restaurant. Farmers farther upriver in Washington State pump irrigation water into alfalfa fields - with both the water and the electricity supplied by a dam. drawn there by some of the cheapest, most environmentally friendly electricity in the nation. Google taps the river’s energy to power a data center 90 minutes east of Portland, Ore. Nearly half of the nation’s hydropower electricity comes from more than 250 hydropower dams that were built on the Columbia and its tributaries - a vast and complex arc of industry and technology that touches tens of millions of lives across the West every day. To ride down the Columbia River as the John Day Dam’s wall of concrete slowly fills the view from a tugboat is to see what the country’s largest network of energy-producing dams created through five decades of 20th-century ambition, investment and hubris.
0 kommentar(er)
