Renewable Northwest executive director, Nicole Hughes, is in Washington DC advocating to bring back employee positions at the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) to stave off the transmission crisis in the Pacific Northwest region.

Since the BPA layoffs, which saw nearly 20% of its employees terminated from their positions in response to the Trump administration’s “Fork in the Road” emails offering the Deferred Resignation program, Hughes told NPM that other power management administrations are reporting the same impact.

According to Hughes, the Western Area Power Administration (WAPA) has seen similar layoffs, though she said it is funded differently than the BPA.

“BPA is given a revolving credit account that they borrow from and repay from the federal government,” she said. “WAPA gets appropriations, so they are more of a traditional federal agency.”

Hughes, concerned about the future of the Pacific Northwest’s grid reliability, said of the BPA layoffs that it wasn’t something anticipated.

“If folks understand how BPA is financed, none of the money used to pay salaries is coming from taxpayers,” she explained. “It’s all coming from ratepayers. So, these layoffs save no taxpayer money at all and seem very unnecessary and will be very disruptive to keeping our system reliable.”

Hughes had already been pushing Congress on a strategy to allow BPA to hire more people at better pay to improve the pace of new projects in the agency’s transmission queue, which has since come to a standstill.

“Our focus for the conversations this week will be to stop the bleeding and get back to the conversation to how we can rehire these positions,” she said.

Also, since the layoffs, Hughes has come across information about some positions being rehired and believes it will be an ongoing process to recover the region’s momentum.

She added that the US Department of Energy (DOE) and BPA are working together on identifying positions that should be reinstated.

For new renewable energy projects, Hughes said that she has heard of process slowdowns due to the layoffs. She has spoken with people doing environmental reviews on projects, mandated by NEPA, who have recently lost their positions, as well as others doing dispatch of energy who took the Fork in the Road email or were let go.

Also, she said that allegedly others who were working for the federal government under one administration and then moved to a new agency have been considered “provisional” and lost their jobs.

“They’re going through itemizing these right now and saying, no, that isn’t someone who should be laid off according to the initial purpose of this,” she said. “I’m not sure if they will be able to backfill the positions that took the ‘Fork in the Road,’ but I’m hoping so.”

Hughes said she was contacted by some members of Congress following the layoffs to find out more information, as well as finding ways to justify why BPA isn’t the “right agency to be picking on right now.”

While in DC, Hughes said she will be working with those members of Congress on talking points for when they go to their counterparts and the DOE.

However, Hughes is also pushing Congress on other issues in the region being faced by the BPA outside of their inability to process its transmission queue.

“The other issue pending right now is BPA is set to make a Day-Ahead Market decision on May 6,” she said. “We’d like them to put that decision on hold, take a pause, and evaluate what the future of the agency will look like.”

NPM queue data is tracking 488 pre-operational projects in the BPA across 122.3 GW.

*This story was originally published exclusively for NPM US subscribers.

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