The Bonneville Power Administration hit all its reliability goals in fiscal 2024 despite massive wildfires, peak load records and public safety power shutoffs, agency staff said during a stakeholder workshop Dec. 4.
The agency managed to meet its reliability targets, which are determined under two indexes: system average interruption duration index and system average interruption frequency index, Richard Shaheen, BPA senior vice president of transmission services, told participants during the agency’s Evolving Grid stakeholder workshop.
But hitting the targets was challenging, as customers set simultaneous peak load records in both summer and winter, Shaheen said.
Loads reached 11,396 MW in early January, setting a demand record not seen “since the time of the aluminum smelters in our territory,” according to Shaheen.
Similarly, loads reached a new summer record of 9,179 MW on July 8. However, that record only lasted one day as BPA saw summer load levels going up to 9,365 MW on July 9.
Shaheen emphasized that BPA tries to meet this new demand by upgrading and expanding the grid. He noted that weather threats continue to pose significant challenges.
“One of the biggest challenges we have from Mother Nature is wildfires,” Shaheen said. “Really a significant threat to our system and [a] significant threat to all of Pacific Northwest.”
The burn area during FY24 increased five times from 2023 within BPA’s service area, Shaheen said.
The burn area in BPA’s service territory equaled 40.8% of the national burn area, according to Shaheen. More than 3.2 million acres burned by the end of FY24, an almost three-fold increase over the 10-year average, BPA stated in its 2024 annual report.
“Really a staggering number and staggering challenge,” Shaheen added.
A recent report from WECC shows wildfires burned 2 million acres in Oregon this summer, breaking the record set in 2020, while the 288,000 acres burned in Washington more than doubled the 10-year average for that state. Idaho and Montana both experienced above-average fire seasons, WECC said.
The agency issued public safety power shutoffs four times in the past year, which impacted five lines. In one of those instances, BPA had to drop load because of a fire threat to infrastructure, Shaheen noted.
However, tools like fire wraps, which are placed around wood poles, have protected infrastructure. Shaheen added that BPA also continuously assesses how to boost wildfire mitigation by using data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and in conversations with industry leaders and organizations.
“We continue to advance the analytics and our plans to try to navigate through that wildfire threat,” Shaheen said. “I’d like to say we’ve been pretty successful so far. We don’t want to be the cause of the fire. We don’t want damage to be caused to our infrastructure due to fire.”
