The Columbia's dams come up for renewal, one license at a time

I. Which dams carry a license, and which do not

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, licenses hydropower that the federal government does not itself operate. In Washington that mostly means dams owned by public utility districts, including the mid-Columbia projects run by the Grant, Chelan, and Douglas county PUDs. Those carry FERC licenses lasting on the order of 30 to 50 years, and each one comes with conditions the utility has to meet for the full life of the license.

The largest dams on the system are a different story. Grand Coulee is a Bureau of Reclamation project, and Bonneville Dam and the four lower Snake River dams belong to the Army Corps of Engineers. Federal dams are not FERC-licensed and do not go through relicensing at all; they are managed through a separate federal process and, in recent years, through court fights and settlements over salmon. So when someone says the dams are up for new licenses, it is the PUD-owned projects that actually fit the phrase.

II. What the process weighs

Fish come first, or close to it. A modern license fight turns on passage for salmon and steelhead: the ladders that let adult fish climb upstream, the screens and bypasses that keep young fish out of the turbines, and the spring and summer spill that flushes them toward the ocean. Because several Columbia Basin runs are listed under the Endangered Species Act, NOAA Fisheries weighs in on what a dam must do to avoid pushing those runs further down, and its conditions can end up written into the license.

Treaty rights sit at the center too. The Yakama Nation and other Columbia Basin tribes hold fishing rights reserved by treaties that predate the dams by roughly a century, and those rights carry real legal weight in how the river is run. On top of that, a FERC license cannot move forward without a Clean Water Act Section 401 certification from the Washington Department of Ecology (a state sign-off that the project will meet water quality standards). Recreation access, cultural sites, and minimum flows for the river below the dam all get weighed in the same file.

III. Where Washington projects stand

Most of the mid-Columbia PUD dams were relicensed back in the 2000s under long terms, so on paper their clocks run well into the future. The Priest Rapids Project run by Grant County PUD received a new multi-decade license around 2008, at last public report, and the Chelan and Douglas county projects were relicensed in roughly the same stretch. That means no cliff is coming next year for these dams, but it does not mean nothing is happening.

Relicensing under FERC's Integrated Licensing Process usually starts about five years before a license expires and can stretch close to a decade once studies, agency review, and settlement talks are counted. The louder Washington hydro story right now is the federal one: the future of the lower Snake River dams runs on its own track through litigation and a 2023 federal and tribal agreement, and that is where the sharpest fights over dams and salmon are playing out. How that resolves is genuinely uncertain, and honest sources disagree about the timeline.

IV. What it means for your river and your bill

Because PUD customers collectively own these dams, the terms of a license are not abstract. More spill for fish, or new passage structures, can shift how much power a dam produces and what it costs to run, and those costs eventually show up in rates. The amounts are usually modest and spread over many years, but this desk would rather say that plainly than pretend a license has no price.

If you want a say, the openings are real. FERC runs public scoping meetings and comment windows during relicensing, and the state's water quality certification has its own public comment period. Your PUD's board meetings are the closest and least crowded place to ask how much a relicensing is expected to cost and what it will change on the river you fish or paddle.