July 11, 2024
By Lynda V. Mapes and Gregory Scruggs
In a long-awaited breakthrough, the U.S. and Canada have reached an agreement in principle renewing the Columbia River Treaty, which governs the use of the most important river flowing through the two nations.
The modernized treaty, which will need to be approved by the U.S. Senate and the Canadian prime minister, was announced Thursday. It updates the treaty that has managed the Columbia Basin and its hydropower dams for more than 50 years. The dams control flooding while also providing reliable flows critical for irrigation, fish, electricity and other needs.
The potential deal comes at a time when the Northwest is facing surging demand for power. The development of data centers and more people adopting electric vehicles and appliances are squeezing power supplies. The region could need as much as 4,000 megawatts of additional power to keep pace with demand over the next five years. Meanwhile, lower snowpack and drought conditions are drying up hydropower.
The treaty will reduce the amount of power the U.S. sends to Canada, but also affords the U.S. less storage capacity in Canadian reservoirs to protect downstream communities in Washington and Oregon from floods for a minimum of 20 years.
A new Columbia River Treaty with Canada
Sources: Columbia Basin Inter-tribal Fish Commission; Northwest Power and Conservation Council; Conflicting stakes and governance relating to the co-management of salmon in the Columbia river basin (U.S.A.) by Nicolas Barbier (Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times)
The treaty with Canada will manage floodwaters and flows into the Columbia, the Northwest’s largest river system.
“These new terms will go a long way toward helping meet the growing demands for energy in the region and avoid building unnecessary fossil fuels-based generation,” Bonneville Power Administration CEO John Hairston said in a news briefing on Thursday.
The deal allows Canada more opportunities to import and export hydropower into the U.S. market, a crucial boost to both countries striving to reach clean-energy goals, President Joe Biden said in a statement.
The agreement was a deep disappointment for fish and river advocates.
“To be blunt, this was a follow-the-money agreement,” said Bill Arthur, chair of the Columbia and Snake River Campaign for the Sierra Club. “Basically the fish got the inadequate status quo, and everyone else got bags full of money.”
Negotiations on the new treaty began in 2018, with the penultimate round of talks held in Seattle last August.
Payment to Canada reduced
Under the new terms, the U.S. will reduce the amount of energy it sends over the border, an arrangement known as the Canadian Entitlement, which the U.S. currently values at between $229 million and $335 million annually. (British Columbia estimates the entitlement is worth $200 million in Canadian dollars.)
Beginning in August, the U.S. will transmit around 40% less power over the border. By 2033, these reductions will translate to roughly 600 megawatts of additional U.S. transmission capacity and 230 megawatts of energy savings annually, according to the Bonneville Power Administration.
Canada will also assume transmission rights under the new treaty terms, which means that the U.S. will no longer pay for the cost of moving energy on the grid to fulfill its power-sharing obligation. While this new arrangement means Canada will incur additional cost, it will also allow for more flexibility as Canada will effectively become an owner, rather than a renter, of electricity transmission capacity.
“The Canadian Entitlement was always projected to go down over time,” B.C. lead negotiator Kathy Eichenberger said in an interview. “This provides Canada certainty over 20 years and stability for the compensation of the operation of our dams for power coordination.”
In exchange for receiving less U.S. power and taking over the transmission rights, Canada will benefit from an expanded intertie north of Spokane funded by Congress under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, though exactly how much additional electricity could move between the two countries remains unclear.
Less flood control for the U.S.
The U.S. will pay Canada $37.6 million per year, indexed for inflation over 20 years, in exchange for 3.6 million acre-feet of storage in Canadian reservoirs, less than half the old treaty’s 8.95 million acre-feet of water storage.
“U.S. flood risk management will be more conservative than today because of treaty changes,” said Michael Connor, the assistant secretary of the Army for civil works.
U.S. officials estimated the new flood-control system would result in unchanged water flows in seven out of 10 years.
The deal narrowly averts an uncharted scenario whereby the U.S. would no longer have legally binding flood control with its upstream neighbor. The existing treaty’s 60-year-old flood-control provisions are set to expire in September, after which point the U.S. will have to request that Canada hold water in its reservoirs to avert downstream flooding in Washington and Oregon, but Canada will not be under any legal obligation to do so.
Next steps
While utilities, shipping interests, riverfront communities, environmental advocates and tribal governments await the exact text of the proposed new treaty in order to better understand the specifics, the goal is to bring the agreement in principle to the region for consideration and discussion, U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said in an interview Wednesday. “We need to hear from the region.”
Negotiators from the two nations will continue to work to finalize details of the treaty and submit it to the Senate for ratification — by the end of the year, Cantwell said.She said the importance of the treaty is immensely significant to the prosperity of the Northwest, whose congressional delegation has pressured the Biden administration to get a deal done in recent years. Cantwell, along with Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, have been key figures lobbying both governments to reach an agreement.
“There is no way to truly estimate the tremendous economic, environmental and recreational value of the Columbia River to our state and region,” she added in a prepared statement Thursday.
River and fish advocates had argued a modernized treaty had to put ecosystem health on the same level of importance as hydropower and flood control. “The ecosystem-based function should have been the third leg of this discussion,” said Shannon Wheeler, chairman of the Nez Perce Tribe. “Restoration work that has been happening in the past and currently has not been enough to recover salmon species; they have remained barely above extinction.”
The tribes expect federal agencies to respect treaties with Native nations, Wheeler said. The Nez Perce and other Columbia River tribes signed the treaties with the U.S. government ceding their lands but in turn reserved their rights to fish in the Snake and Columbia forever.
Northwest civic, faith, clean energy and conservation organizations that worked to guide the negotiations for years are “frustrated and disappointed,” said Joseph Bogaard, of the Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition.
“This agreement maintains the primacy of power production and flood-risk management and continues to leave salmon and the health of the river uncertain and at risk,” Bogaard said. “This river is sick, and its fish are in trouble. We will be engaged to ensure the agreement is as good as it can be, but salmon and the river are starting at an extreme disadvantage.”
Even as the agreement was announced more than 700,000 sockeye heading over Columbia River dams were stopped by hot water in the Okanogan River just south of their Canadian spawning grounds. Whether they will ever reach home is uncertain.
Seattle Times: 'U.S. and Canada reach deal on Columbia River Treaty' article link
