In a long-awaited breakthrough, the United States and Canada have reached an agreement in principle to update the Columbia River Treaty, which governs use of the two countries’ most important river.
The modernized treaty, announced Thursday, still requires approval by the U.S. Senate and the Canadian Prime Minister. It updates a treaty that has governed the Columbia Basin and its hydroelectric dams for more than 50 years. The dams control flooding while also providing a steady flow of water essential for irrigation, fish, power and other needs.
The potential deal comes at a time when the Northwest is facing a surge in electricity demand, with data center development and more people adopting electric vehicles and appliances putting a strain on power supplies. The region could need up to 4,000 megawatts of additional power to meet demand over the next five years. Meanwhile, declining snowpack and droughts are causing hydroelectric generation to dry up.
The treaty will reduce the amount of electricity the United States sends to Canada, but it will also reduce the amount of water storage in Canadian reservoirs that the United States reserves to protect downstream communities in Washington and Oregon from flooding for at least 20 years.
“These new terms will go a long way to meeting the region’s growing energy needs and avoid the construction of unnecessary fossil fuel-based power plants,” Bonneville Power Administration CEO John Hairston said at a press conference Thursday.
President Joe Biden said in a statement that the agreement will provide Canada with expanded opportunities to import and export hydroelectric power to the U.S. market, providing an important boost to both countries as they strive to achieve clean energy goals.
The agreement came as a major disappointment to fish and river conservationists.
“Frankly, this was a financially driven deal,” said Bill Arthur, chairman of the Sierra Club’s Columbia-Snake River Campaign. “Basically, it maintained an inadequate status quo for the fish, and everybody else got a big buck.”
Negotiations on the new treaty began in 2018, with the penultimate round of talks taking place in Seattle last August.
Reduced payments to Canada
Under the new terms, the U.S. would cut back on the amount of energy it sends across the border, an arrangement known as the “Canadian Rights,” which the U.S. currently values at $229 million to $335 million a year. (British Columbia puts the value of the rights at $200 million Canadian.)
Starting in August, the United States will cut cross-border electricity transmissions by about 40 percent. The cuts will increase U.S. transmission capacity by about 600 megawatts by 2033 and save 230 megawatts of energy annually, according to the Bonneville Power Administration.
Canada will also inherit transmission rights under the terms of the new treaty, meaning the U.S. won’t have to pay the costs of moving energy over the grid to meet its distribution obligations. While the new arrangement means additional costs for Canada, it also gives it more flexibility because Canada will essentially be the owner, not the lessee, of transmission capacity.
“It was always expected that Canada’s rights would go down over time,” B.C.’s lead negotiator Cathy Eichenberger said in an interview. “This gives Canada certainty over a 20-year period and stability in operational compensation for the dams for power regulation.”
Canada would benefit from an expanded interconnection north of Spokane funded by Congress under bipartisan infrastructure legislation in exchange for reducing its power supplies from the U.S. and taking over transmission rights, but it’s unclear how much extra power could move between the two countries.
US flood protection measures decline
The United States would pay Canada $37.6 million annually for 20 years, indexed against inflation, in exchange for storing 3.6 million acre-feet of water in Canadian reservoirs — less than half the 8.95 million acre-feet reserved under the old treaty.
“The treaty changes will result in U.S. flood risk management being more conservative than it is today,” said Michael Conner, assistant secretary of the Army for civil works.
U.S. officials estimated that the new flood-control system would keep water levels constant for seven out of 10 years.
The agreement narrowly avoids an uncharted scenario in which the United States is unable to enter into legally binding flood protection agreements with its upstream neighbors. The flood protection provisions of the current 60-year-old treaty are set to expire in September, after which the United States would have to ask Canada to store water in reservoirs to prevent flooding downstream in Washington and Oregon, even though Canada has no legal obligation to do so.
Next steps
While utilities, the shipping industry, riverside communities, environmentalists and tribal governments await the exact language of the proposed new treaty to better understand the details, the goal is to bring an agreement in principle to the community for consideration and discussion, U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said in an interview Wednesday. “We need to hear from the community.”
Cantwell said negotiators from both countries would continue working to finalize the details of the treaty and submit it to the Senate for ratification by the end of the year.
She said the importance of this treaty is so important to the prosperity of the Northwest that the Northwest’s congressional delegation Putting pressure on the Biden administration In recent years, Senator Cantwell has played a key role in getting the deal done, along with Republican Rep. James Risch of Idaho. Lobbying both governments Reach an agreement.
“There is no way to accurately estimate the enormous economic, environmental and recreational value the Columbia River provides to our state and region,” she added in a prepared statement Thursday.
River and fish advocates have argued that a modernized treaty should place ecosystem health on the same level as hydroelectric generation and flood control. “Ecosystem-based function should have been the third pillar of this discussion,” said Shannon Wheeler, chair of the Nez Perce Tribe. “Restoration efforts, past and present, have not been enough to help salmon species recover, and they remain endangered.”
Wheeler said tribes expect federal agencies to honor treaties with Native Americans. The Nez Perce and other Columbia River tribes signed treaties that ceded land to the U.S. government but in exchange reserved the right to fish in the Snake and Columbia rivers in perpetuity.
The Northwest civic, faith, clean energy and environmental groups that have been guiding negotiations for years are “frustrated and disappointed,” said Joseph Bogard of the Coalition to Save Wild Salmon.
“This agreement keeps power generation and flood risk management top of mind, leaving the health of our salmon and rivers uncertain and at risk,” Bogard said. “The river is sick and our fish are at risk. We will work hard to make the agreement as good as it can be, but our salmon and rivers are starting from an extremely disadvantageous position.”
Shortly after the agreement was announced, more than 700,000 sockeye salmon were being held up over dams on the Columbia River by hot waters in the Okanogan River, just south of their Canadian spawning grounds, leaving it unclear whether they will be able to reach home.
