Reclamation hands BPA switchyards

The switchyards that direct the power from Grand Coulee Dam have been owned by that Bureau of Reclamation project since it was all built, but that just changed.

On Tuesday, the Reclamation formally handed over ownership of those assets to the Bonneville Power Administration at a signing ceremony in front of the dam, much of which was used to recognize those in each agency who worked to make it happen, many of them for years.

Grand Coulee Power Manager Coleman Smith said he has been working on this project since 2017-18. Several others said the same.

It's a complex undertaking, involving multiple facets of managing major components of two large federal agencies.

A log of every piece of equipment involved in the transfer comprises tens of thousands of lines on spreadsheets, said Kevlyn Baker, BPA's manager of customer service engineering.

Land ownership is not part of the transfer, but land use agreements are.

"When you're working between federal agencies ... we both have a lot of rules we have to work through and questions to get answered, Baker said, "... a lot of agreements around just how the transition will work over five years, how compliance between us will work for five years. We had to work on land rights. ... Now that we own the equipment, we have the have to have the right to have the equipment on their land."

The switchyards involved are the 115kV yard, the 230 kV yard (which you can see from the highway to Bridgeport, and the 500 kV yard.

BPA plans to replace or upgrade the equipment in those facilities.

The transfer is not a part of a recently announced BPA plan to beef up transmission capacity to meet expected coming demand, Baker said, it having started long before BPA's expected $2 billion investment in the grid in the Pacific Northwest.

But making the upgrades at Grand Coulee now will help speed that process along.

Meanwhile, BPA will be adding about 14 employees to the Grand Coulee Dam area, said Dan Quillen, who will head the agency's newest district here.

"Taking advantage of BPA's ability to borrow from the US Treasury," noted the agency administrator and CEO, John Hairston, "this asset swap opens the door to efficiencies, eliminates financial hurdles, and reduces expenses associated with interagency coordination."

The transfer will take about five years, and BPA will make the investments in upgrading the switchyards over a decade.

Hairston said Grand Coulee is the region's largest and most flexible resource and will be "a major enabler of the region's clean energy transition."