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Bonneville Power Administration: The Backbone of the Pacific Northwest Grid
John Day Dam, one of the 31 federal dams the power from which BPA markets.
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20 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER
Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position. Elliot Mainzer: I have a background in business and environmental studies and have been working at Bonneville for over 17 years. I started at BPA in 2002 and spent my first 10 years working in different parts of the organization, including energy trading, transmission policy and rates, customer service engineering, and strategic planning. I worked on a variety of regional issues, including wind energy integration, market design, and technology innovation and was fortunate enough to develop collaborative working relationships with a wide variety of regional partners, including our customers, tribes, environmental organizations, regulators, and the members of the Northwest’s congressional delegation. Bonneville provided me with many opportunities to learn and grow. After several years as the executive vice president of corporate strategy, I served briefly as the deputy administrator and then took on the role of administrator and chief executive officer in 2013 during
PHOTOS COURTESY OF BPA.
he Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) is a nonprofit federal power marketing administration based in the Pacific Northwest that is congressionally mandated to market and transmit the power created by all the federally owned hydroelectric projects on the Columbia River. BPA has marketing responsibility for 31 dams as well as the Columbia Generating Station nuclear plant. BPA also operates and maintains 15,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines in its service territory. BPA’s territory includes Idaho, Oregon, Washington, western Montana, and small parts of California, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming. Although BPA is part of the U.S. Department of Energy, it is self funding and covers its costs by selling its products and services. As with many water and power utilities, its top issues include maintaining its infrastructure, adapting to a changing market, and balancing environmental concerns with fulfilling its mission. In this interview, Administrator Elliot Mainzer tells Municipal Water Leader about how his organization provides affordable, reliable, carbon-free power to municipal, public, and investor-owned utilities across the Northwest.
