The Bonneville Power Administration faces monumental challenges in implementing actions to meet the Pacific Northwest’s needs once it lifts its pause on transmission planning, multiple stakeholders told RTO Insider.

BPA issued the pause in February to consider new “reforms” in light of “exponential growth” of transmission service requests. The agency’s 2025 transmission cluster study includes over 65 GW of requests, compared with 5.9 GW in 2021. The requests exceed the total regional load projected for the Pacific Northwest in 2034, according to the agency. (See BPA Halts Some Tx Planning Processes Amid Surge of Service Requests.)

To deal with the demand, BPA Administrator John Hairston has set ambitious goals for the agency. In a recent keynote address at the Western Conference of Public Service Commissioners’ annual meeting, Hairston noted that much of the challenge stems from planning “around prospective data centers or generators that may never come to fruition.”

Hairston said the agency sees the need for a “new planning paradigm.” It is “rethinking” its transmission planning processes and working with its utility customers to identify new approaches by the end of the year. (See Industry Needs ‘New Planning Paradigm,’ BPA Chief Tells Regulators.) Ultimately, Hairston wants to reduce the time from transmission request to service to five to six years.

In an email to RTO Insider, BPA spokesperson Nick Quinata said the agency “has committed to considering radical new methods to reduce the time it takes to enhance infrastructure to accommodate its customers’ needs.”

BPA will provide more information on its timeline and proposed solutions at a workshop in July.

A New Approach

But analyzing 65 GW is “impossible,” Randy Hardy, the agency’s administrator from 1991 to 1997, told RTO Insider.

“They’ve got to somehow define a set of rules that will give them a more realistic ability to analyze whatever subset of the 65 GW they deem appropriate,” Hardy said.

Much of the issue stems from aggressive clean energy legislation passed in Washington and Oregon in 2019 and 2021, respectively. The laws set strict standards for greenhouse gas emissions and ushered the region into a “gold rush” among developers, eventually leading to today’s situation, according to Hardy. (See Clean Energy, Equity Goals to Reshape Oregon IRP Process and Washington Agencies Adopt New Rules to Implement CETA.)

Even though not every project will be completed, BPA must assume the opposite when analyzing them, Hardy said.

“The cumulative costs associated with building all that transmission means that the expenses of any particular transmission service request are enormous,” he added.

He noted the 2023 cluster study included approximately 17 GW. The challenges with 65 GW are greater, and “even if you could analyze it, the cost would be so ridiculously high that nobody would sign up for anything.”

BPA must depart from the principle of first come, first serve when taking on requests, Hardy said.

The agency is “not regulated technically by FERC … but they’ve made a policy commitment to align themselves as closely as they can to the FERC pro forma tariff,” Hardy said. “They’re probably going to have to loosen that to some extent, because first come, first serve is not going to allow them to resolve this. They’ve got to be able to exercise some engineering judgment of the transmission service requests that are filed as to which ones look the most promising.”

Because FERC does not regulate BPA, the agency can and should take “bold steps” to clear up the transmission queue, Nicole Hughes, executive director at Renewable Northwest, told RTO Insider.

BPA should use its power to “wean out” speculative projects that are unlikely to get built. The challenge is to clear the queue equitably, Hughes said.

“We want to make sure that generation and load are being treated equitably and that load doesn’t take a higher priority here,” according to Hughes. “We want to make sure that the point-to-point customers are being treated equitably and the network customers aren’t being prioritized here.”

BPA has allowed other issues to take priority, like long-term contracts and its day-ahead market process, and the agency is now in “panic mode,” Hughes said. (See BPA Flooded with Comments on Draft Day-ahead Market Decision.)

Proactivity

Renewable Northwest has been a supporter of BPA taking a more proactive approach to transmission planning, Hughes said. She pointed to the Western Transmission Expansion Coalition (WestTEC), which is jointly facilitated by the Western Power Pool and WECC, as an example. (See WestTEC Tx Study on Track Despite Delays.)

WestTEC’s goal is to produce an actionable study to inform Western grid planning over 10- and 20-year planning horizons. Hughes said it’s unclear what BPA will do with the information coming out of the WestTEC process, saying “that’s still to be decided.”

Henry Tilghman, a consultant whose clients include Renewable Northwest and the Northwest & Intermountain Power Producers Coalition (NIPPC), said there is a disconnect between the development time frames for different types of facilities that need to be addressed. (Tilghman spoke with RTO Insider on his own behalf, not that of his clients.)

“You can bring a new gas plant or renewable generator online in 18 months once you have all of your permits and the financing in place,” Tilghman said. “The construction time can be a year and a half. Same for a data center. But if you’re looking at a new transmission expansion with all of the siting and permitting and everything, that … takes at least 10 years to do. …

“I think a lot of the problems that the region is facing that Bonneville is attempting to solve stem from really just sort of an inadequate regional planning process,” Tilghman added. “Even if we get it fixed … through Order 1920 compliance, we’re still catching up on all that planning work that could have been done and hasn’t been done.”

According to Lauren Tenney Denison, director of market policy and grid strategy at the Public Power Council (PPC), BPA is considering moving toward proactive planning as a possible solution.

“The cost and risk discussion is going to be a really important one throughout this process,” Denison said. “Building ahead of time, doing this proactive building that BPA is talking about, it has the ability to get us ready for future needs. But there is a cost to that, and so it’s just a challenging issue that we will need to address with the region as we work through this.”

Other challenges include the time it takes to build new transmission, a scarce labor pool and an arduous permitting process, PPC CEO Scott Simms said. For example, crossing state lines and different jurisdictions and federal agencies bring a host of bureaucratic headaches for developers, he said.

“We’ve seen proposals where segments of a line are approved and then they have a window, but there’s approval pending somewhere else, and then the original approval expires while the new ones being granted,” Simms said. “That’s just paperwork that can be easily revamped and removed.”

With a Little Help from Customers

There are opportunities for BPA customers to assist in developing transmission infrastructure, something Simms hopes will get fast tracked as the agency considers planning changes.

He said BPA appears willing to “engage or explore some disruptive elements that we haven’t done before.”

“We think that category includes the element of how customers of BPA can help shoulder some of that burden in order to make the regional objectives get achieved more quickly,” he added.

The PPC has support for this idea from NIPPC Executive Director Spencer Gray, among others.

“Bonneville has had, and does have, a pretty restrictive approach to outsourcing some of the grid upgrade work to customers,” Gray said. “We’re hoping that that can change. That feels like really low-hanging fruit. I think the place that’s most relevant is for network upgrades for interconnection customers. Both generators and load.”

There is an opportunity to leave more of the building to customers in the pro forma Open Access Transmission Tariff, according to Gray.

“We really think there’s room to liberalize that self-build option in the Northwest on Bonneville’s grid,” Gray said. Allowing a customer to either build themselves or contract out some of the work “would alleviate a lot of the burden on Bonneville itself to pull off some of these upgrades” and let the agency focus on “transmission service-driven upgrades rather than interconnection.”

Aaron Tinjum, vice president of energy for the Data Center Coalition, told RTO Insider in a statement that data center companies “are leaning in as engaged partners across the country to ensure we meet this moment in a way that supports both data center development and an affordable, reliable electricity grid for all customers.”

The industry is “committed to paying the full cost of service for the energy it uses, including transmission costs,” he said.

Workforce Challenges

Other reforms are needed to meet Hairston’s five-to-six-year timeline. A crucial one is allowing BPA to competitively pay staff. There’s a big pay gap between BPA and consumer- and investor-owned utilities, Gray said.

“Any entity of comparable size to Bonneville in terms of asset, ownership, operating revenue, circuit miles of transmission … they just pay more,” Gray added. “And if we’re going to keep good staff, new talented ones, we really need to get [BPA] competitive pay authority so [BPA] can compete in the market for personnel.”

The bipartisan Reliability for Ratepayers Act, passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Jan. 15, aims to address this issue. Still, stakeholders told RTO Insider recent federal staffing cuts and “deferred resignation” buyout offers from President Donald Trump’s unofficial Department of Government Efficiency have caused significant disruptions and risk shaking morale at BPA.

About 200 agency employees — or 6% of the workforce — accepted the buyout offer, while 90 job offers had been rescinded following a federal hiring freeze announced Jan. 20, according to BPA.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has said BPA will not undergo more staffing cuts as part of Trump’s quest to slim down the federal government. BPA’s federal workforce now stands at around 3,150 employees, Hairston said during the agency’s quarterly business review May 15. (See BPA Exempted from Federal Staffing Cuts, Hairston Says.)

Whether BPA can meet the five-to-six-year goal hinges on a sufficient workforce and the lifting of the federal hiring freeze, former Administrator Hardy said. He put the odds of accomplishing the goal at 50/50.

“They’re stuck with being down 200 positions when they actually need more than the 200 positions to be able to have sufficient staff to get them to a 90% or 80% level of confidence that they can accomplish all this stuff,” according to Hardy. “So can it be done? Maybe, but it is a huge, huge challenge given the staffing restrictions that they’re now subject to under the Trump administration.”