By CLAIRE RUSH
Associated Press

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Three Oregon lawmakers say they plan to introduce a bill that would bar utilities from raising rates if they have unresolved wildfire lawsuits for three or more years, describing it as an effort to hold PacifiCorp accountable as the utility faces a series of lawsuits stemming from the deadly 2020 wildfires that ravaged the state.

Republican state Reps. Jami Cate, Virgle Osborne and Ed Diehl announced their proposal in a statement Monday, on the heels of an approved rate increase for PacifiCorp customers and a federal lawsuit against the electric power company.

The federal government sued PacifiCorp last week over the Archie Creek Fire, which ignited in Oregon’s Douglas County in September 2020 and burned more than 200 square miles, about half of which was federal land. The complaint accuses the company of negligence for failing to maintain its power lines to prevent wildfires. In its filing, the government says it brought the suit to recover “substantial costs and damages.”

A PacifiCorp spokesperson said in an emailed statement Monday that the company was working with the U.S. government to resolve the claims.

“It is unfortunate the U.S. government decided to file a lawsuit in federal district court, however PacifiCorp will continue to work with the U.S. government to find reasonable resolution of this matter,” the statement said.

The federal lawsuit was filed on the same day the Oregon Public Utility Commission approved a 9.8 percent rate increase for PacifiCorp’s residential customers next year. In its rate case filings, the company said its request to increase rates was partly due to higher costs stemming from wildfire risk and activity.

When the new rate takes effect in January, PacifiCorp rates will have increased nearly 50 percent since 2021, according to the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board, which advocates on behalf of utility customers.

The three lawmakers said they will introduce their bill in the upcoming legislative session, which starts in January.

“The federal government is doing the right thing by filing this lawsuit, and we stand firmly behind it,” Osborne, who is set to be the future bill’s co-chief sponsor, said in a statement. “PacifiCorp needs to pay up and take responsibility for the destruction they’ve caused, and putting a stop to rate hikes is the best way to achieve it.”

PacifiCorp is poised to be on the hook for billions in damages in the series of lawsuits over Oregon’s 2020 fires.

The company has already reached two settlement agreements over the Archie Creek Fire, including one for $299 million with 463 plaintiffs impacted by the blaze and another for $250 million with 10 companies with commercial timber interests, according to its website.

In other litigation, an Oregon jury in June 2023 found it liable for negligently failing to cut power to its 600,000 customers despite warnings from top fire officials and determined it should have to pay punitive and other damages — a decision that applied to a class including the owners of up to 2,500 properties. Since then, other Oregon juries have ordered the company to pay tens of millions to other wildfire victims.

The wildfires that erupted across Oregon over Labor Day weekend in 2020 were among the worst natural disasters in state history, killing nine people and destroying thousands of homes.

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CASPER, Wyo. (AP) — An electric utility has completed its plan to more than double the amount of wind power it can send to customers in the Rocky Mountain region and Northwest.

Rocky Mountain Power’s Energy Vision 2020 plan, announced in 2017, included four Wyoming wind projects: Cedar Springs I, Cedar Springs II, Ekola Flats and TB Flats. Combined, they have a capacity of 1,150 megawatts, enough for more than 300,000 average-sized homes.

The program also involved revamping existing wind farms and building 140 miles of transmission line between Medicine Bow and Rock Springs in southern Wyoming.

The expanded wind capacity goes to customers in Wyoming as well as California, Idaho, Oregon, Utah and Washington — the six states served by Rocky Mountain Power’s parent company, Portland, Oregon-based PacifiCorp, the Casper Star-Tribune reports.

The final Wyoming wind project, the 500-megawatt TB Flats wind farm in Carbon County, went online in April. It took Rocky Mountain Power several months to declare the facility commercially operational.

“We’re not done yet,” Rocky Mountain Power spokesman David Eskelsen said. “The demand for electricity is continuing to grow, the energy economy is changing rapidly, and so we look to Wyoming to be a resource to help us meet the needs of our customers for many years to come.”

PacifiCorp has wind farms elsewhere but Wyoming has the best sites for wind density in the utility’s service territory, Eskelsen said.

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By GILLIAN FLACCUS
Associated Press

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A proposal to bring down four hydroelectric dams near the California-Oregon border cleared a major regulatory hurdle Thursday, setting the stage for the largest dam demolition project in U.S. history to save imperiled migratory salmon.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission action comes after the demolition proposal almost fell apart last summer, but then a new agreement and additional funding revived it. Thursday’s ruling will allow the utility that runs the dams, PacifiCorp, to transfer its hydroelectric license jointly to the nonprofit Klamath River Renewal Corp., Oregon and California.

Regulators still must approve the actual surrender of the license. Dam removal could start in 2023.

Tribes on the lower Klamath River that have watched salmon struggle applauded the decision. Salmon are at the heart of the culture, beliefs and diet of a half-dozen regional tribes, including the Yurok and Karuk — both parties to the agreement — and they have suffered deeply from that loss.

This week, California accepted a petition to add Klamath-Trinity River spring chinook salmon to the state’s endangered species list.

The aging dams were built before current environmental regulations and essentially cut the 253-mile-long river in half for migrating salmon, whose numbers have been plummeting.

Coho salmon from the river are listed as threatened under federal and California law, and their population has fallen anywhere from 52 percent to 95 percent. Spring chinook salmon, once the Klamath Basin‘s largest run, has dwindled by 98 percent.

Fall chinook, the last to persist in any significant numbers, have been so meager in the past few years that the Yurok Tribe canceled fishing for the first time in memory. In 2017, they bought fish at a grocery store for their annual salmon festival.

Another tribe, the Karuk Tribe, said in a statement that the regulators’ decision “reflects the hard work of our partnership with PacifiCorp, California, Oregon, and the Yurok Tribe. After this year’s massive fish kill, we need dam removal more than ever.”

The dams don’t store agricultural water, aren’t used for flood control and aren’t part of the 200,000-acre Klamath Project, an irrigation project further north that straddles the Oregon-California border.

Removing the structures would affect homeowners who live around man-made lakes created by the dams.

If the dams remained, PacifiCorp would likely have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to retrofit the structures to comply with today’s environmental laws. As it is, the utility has said the electricity generated by the dams no longer makes up a significant part of its power portfolio.

The demolition proposal foundered last summer after regulators initially balked at allowing PacifiCorp to completely exit the project.

A new plan unveiled in November appears to address regulators’ concerns that the nonprofit entity overseeing the demolition would struggle if there were any cost overruns or liability issues.

The new plan makes Oregon and California equal partners in the demolition with the Klamath River Renewal Corporation and adds $45 million to the project’s $450 million budget. The states and PacifiCorp, which is owned by billionaire Warren Buffett’s company Berkshire Hathaway, will each provide one-third of the additional funds.

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By GILLIAN FLACCUS
Associated Press

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — An agreement announced Tuesday paves the way for the largest dam demolition in U.S. history, a project that promises to reopen hundreds of miles of waterway along the Oregon-California border to salmon that are critical to tribes but have dwindled to almost nothing in recent years.

If approved, the deal would revive plans to remove four massive hydroelectric dams on the lower Klamath River, creating the foundation for the most ambitious salmon restoration effort in history.

The project on California’s second-largest river would be at the vanguard of a trend toward dam demolitions in the U.S. as the structures age and become less economically viable amid growing environmental concerns about the health of native fish.

Previous efforts to address problems in the Klamath Basin have fallen apart amid years of legal sparring that generated distrust among tribes, fishing groups, farmers and environmentalists, and the new agreement could face more legal challenges. Some state and federal lawmakers criticized it as a financially irresponsible overreach by leaders in Oregon and California.

“This dam removal is more than just a concrete project coming down. It’s a new day and a new era,” Yurok Tribe chairman Joseph James said. “To me, this is who we are, to have a free-flowing river just as those who have come before us. … Our way of life will thrive with these dams being out.”

A half-dozen tribes across Oregon and California, fishing groups and environmentalists had hoped to see demolition work begin as soon as 2022. But those plans stalled in July, when U.S. regulators questioned whether the nonprofit entity formed to oversee the project could adequately respond to any cost overruns or accidents.

The new plan makes Oregon and California equal partners in the demolition with the nonprofit entity, called the Klamath River Renewal Corp., and adds $45 million to the project’s $450 million budget to ease those concerns. Oregon, California and the utility PacifiCorp, which operates the hydroelectric dams and is owned by billionaire Warren Buffett’s company Berkshire Hathaway, will each provide one-third of the additional funds.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission must approve the deal. If accepted, it would allow PacifiCorp and Berkshire Hathaway to walk away from aging dams that are more of an albatross than a profit-generator, while addressing regulators’ concerns. Oregon, California and the nonprofit would jointly take over the hydroelectric license from PacifiCorp while the nonprofit will oversee the work.

Buffett said the reworked deal solves a “very complex challenge.”

“I recognize the importance of Klamath dam removal and river restoration for tribal people in the Klamath Basin,” Buffett said in a statement. “We appreciate and respect our tribal partners for their collaboration in forging an agreement that delivers an exceptional outcome for the river, as well as future generations.”

Removed would be the four southernmost dams in a string of six constructed in southern Oregon and far Northern California beginning in 1918.

They were built solely for power generation. They are not used for irrigation and not managed for flood control. The lowest dam on the river, the Iron Gate, has no “fish ladder,” or concrete chutes that fish can pass through.

That’s blocked hundreds of miles of potential fish habitat and spawning grounds, and fish populations have dropped precipitously in recent years. Salmon are at the heart of the culture, beliefs and diet of a half-dozen regional tribes, including the Yurok and Karuk — both parties to the agreement — and they have suffered deeply from that loss.

Coho salmon from the Klamath River are listed as threatened under federal and California law, and their population in the river has fallen anywhere from 52 percent to 95 percent. Spring chinook salmon, once the Klamath Basin’s largest run, has dwindled by 98%.

Fall chinook, the last to persist in any significant numbers, have been so meager in the past few years that the Yurok canceled fishing for the first time in the tribe’s memory. In 2017, they bought fish at a grocery store for their annual salmon festival.

“It is bleak, but I want to have hope that with dam removal and with all the prayers that we’ve been sending up all these years, salmon could come back. If we just give them a chance, they will,” said Chook-Chook Hillman, a Karuk tribal member fighting for dam removal. “If you provide a good place for salmon, they’ll always come home.”

PacifiCorp has been operating the dams under an extension of its expired hydroelectric license for years. The license was originally granted before modern environmental laws and renewing it would mean costly renovations to install fish ladders. The utility has said energy generated by the dams no longer makes up a significant part of its portfolio.

In the original deal, PacifiCorp was to transfer its license and contribute $200 million to bow out of the removal project and avoid further costs and liability. An additional $250 million comes from a voter-approved California water bond.

U.S. regulators, however, agreed only on the condition that PacifiCorp remain a co-licensee along with the Klamath River Renewal Corporation — a nonstarter for the utility.

Residents have been caught in the middle. As tribes watched salmon dwindle, some homeowners around a huge reservoir created by one of the dams have sued to stop the demolition.

They say their waterfront property values have already fallen by half because of news coverage associated with demolition and they worry about losing a water source for fighting wildfires in an increasingly fire-prone landscape. Many also oppose the use of ratepayer funds for the project.

U.S. Rep. Doug LaMalfa, a California Republican, said the agreement puts taxpayers in the two states on the hook. Some state lawmakers in Oregon said Gov. Kate Brown violated her constitutional authority by authorizing the deal without legislative or voter approval.

Further upstream, farmers who rely on two other dams are watching carefully. The removal of the lower four dams won’t affect them directly, but they worry it could set a precedent for dam removal on the Klamath.

More than 1,720 dams have been dismantled around the U.S. since 2012, according to American Rivers, and 26 states undertook dam removal projects in 2019 alone. The Klamath River project would be the largest such project by far if it proceeds.

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KLAMATH FALLS, Ore. (AP) — Removing four hydroelectric dams along the lower Klamath River in Southern Oregon and Northern California is expected to cost just under $434 million and could happen by 2022, according to a new filing with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The Capital Press reports the nonprofit Klamath River Renewal Corp. submitted plans with FERC in 2018 to decommission and demolish J.C. Boyle, Copco Nos. 1 and 2 and Iron Gate dams, which block about 400 miles of upstream habitat for migratory salmon and steelhead.

Regulators are now considering whether to transfer the dams’ operating license from PacifiCorp to KRRC before the project can move forward. A general contractor, Kiewit Infrastructure West Co. of Fairfield, Calif., is already on board and working on a plan for razing the dams.

But first, KRRC must answer questions from a six-member independent board of consultants appointed by the feds to prove they have the money, insurance and contingency for such a large proposal.

Mark Bransom, KRRC executive director, said the filing “proves that we understand the magnitude of our charge and are on the right path.”

“This is a project of vast importance for the environment, the river and the people and communities in the Klamath Basin,” Bransom said. “We have the funding, the team, the expertise and the plan to do it right and pen a vibrant new chapter of Klamath River history.”

Built between 1911 and 1962, the lower Klamath River dams are currently operated by PacifiCorp and have a total generation capacity of 169 megawatts. Efforts to remove the dams date back to the 2010, when farmers, tribes, environmental groups and government agencies all signed on to the Klamath Hydroelectric Settlement Agreement.

By restoring a more free-flowing river, the parties hope to improve spawning and survival of fish species protected under the Endangered Species Act.

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SEATTLE (AP) — A Washington state judge has agreed with an electric utility and permanently blocked the public release of some economic information about its coal-burning units.

The Sierra Club wanted the redacted information to be made public, saying people should have data about the financial risks of operating coal-burning power plants.

PacifiCorp, based in Portland, argued that releasing the confidential information would put it at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace.

A Thurston County Superior Court judge granted the permanent injunction during a hearing Friday.

PacifiCorp spokesman Bob Gravely says the company is pleased with the court’s decision and plans on working a more complete analysis in coming months.

Sierra Club managing attorney Gloria Smith said in a statement that it’s unfortunate the public won’t get to see PacifiCorp’s analysis of the cost of their coal plants.

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By PHUONG LE
Associated Press

SEATTLE (AP) — An electric utility is asking a Washington state judge to permanently block the public release of some economic information it provided to state regulators about its coal-burning units.

The Sierra Club says the public should have clear information about the financial risks of operating coal-burning power plants. It filed a public records request seeking information that PacifiCorp blacked out in a coal analysis the company provided to the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission this summer.

In July, PacifiCorp won a temporary restraining order to prevent state regulators from releasing that information publicly. A Thurston County Superior Court judge is scheduled Friday to hear whether to make that injunction permanent.

The utility, based in Portland, completed a unit-specific analysis on the costs of retiring its coal-burning units — at the request of Oregon state regulators — but redacted some information it said was confidential and “commercially sensitive.”

“This is a partial analysis that doesn’t provide a complete picture of whether or not a coal unit should be retired early,” said Bob Gravely, a PacifiCorp spokesman. He said releasing the information could do real harm because it can be misconstrued and distort the market. The utility provided the redacted information to those who signed non-disclosure agreements, he added.

The utility serves 1.9 million customers in six Western states, including Washington and Oregon. Coal accounts for about 62 percent of PacifiCorp’s supply mix, and it has 26 coal-burning units in Wyoming, Utah, Montana and other states.

The Sierra Club says that there’s a strong public interest in the information, that it is not a trade secret and that the utility hasn’t met its burden to prove that disclosing it would result in harm to the company.

The Sierra Club has been pushing utilities nationwide to retire coal-burning plants or replace them with renewable energy sources such as wind or solar, arguing the cost of operating coal-fired power plants is too high and costs ratepayers.

The Trump administration is actively trying to prop up the coal industry and extend the life of coal plants, said Caleb Heeringa, deputy press secretary for the Sierra Club’s beyond coal campaign.

“It’s never been more important that we have clear information about the cost of operating of those plants,” Heeringa said.

The Environmental Protection Agency last month said it would dismantle Obama-era pollution regulations that it called overly prescriptive and burdensome. Its proposal broadly increases the authority given to states to decide how and how much to regulate existing coal power plants.

In August, an administrative law judge with Oregon’s Public Utility Commission sided with PacifiCorp and declined to release the coal analysis, calling it “a trade secret” and not public information.

In Washington, state regulators haven’t taken a position, said spokesman Dean Pertner.

“The UTC will release confidential records filed with the UTC that are responsive to a public records request unless there is a court order preventing disclosure,” Pertner said.

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