megawatts by microwave
megawatts by microwave
2026-07-04
In 1914 the Department of the Interior, through the Bureau of Reclamation,<br>investigated the possibilities of developing the Columbia River. Thousands of<br>arid but potentially fertile acres needed only water to become the Imperial<br>Valley of the Northwest. Locked in the mountain ranges were valuable ores<br>awaiting electricity to turn them into needed metals.
Two years later the State engineer of Oregon urged the development of the<br>Bonneville site as a national-defense measure: he saw in the proposed power<br>project a source of fertilizer in time of peace and nitrates in time of war.<br>The dam also would completely drown out the Cascade Rapids and extend<br>slack-water navigation some 40 miles eastward to The Dalles.
The Rivers and Harbors Act of 1925 directed the Secretary of War, through the<br>Corps of Engineers, United States Army, to prepare and submit to the Congress<br>an estimate of the cost of surveys, examinations, and investigations of all<br>navigable streams and their tributaries where power development appeared<br>feasible. (Q1)
It is difficult to succinctly explain why, exactly, the United States Army has<br>spent much of its history involved in the construction of dams. It is partly an<br>accident of history, partly the result of interagency federal politics, and<br>entirely a product of American culture. In his book "Cadillac Desert," Marc<br>Reisner examines the history of the American West's water control projects<br>as a religious project, one animated less by practical needs than by a sense<br>that domination of the West's rivers was destiny.
The Bureau of Reclamation, part of the Department of the Interior, was formed<br>for that purpose. At the time, though, the Army had already been used to survey<br>and improve rivers for nearly 100 years. They were not content to give it up. The<br>result was a rivalry, one with several feints and blows before the two settled<br>into their modern areas of control. For the Bureau of Reclamation, the Hoover<br>Dam was their signature project. For the Corps of Engineers, the battle that<br>would go down in history was the Columbia River Project.
The motivations for damming the Columbia were various. The Columbia was prone to<br>flooding, which had caused damage and limited use of land along it. There was a<br>great deal of land surrounding the Columbia that could be farmed, if the<br>Columbia could be tapped for irrigation. Electricity, too, was a reason,<br>although initially a somewhat secondary one. Perhaps the greatest reason,<br>though, was simply economic: by the time that the major parts of the Columbia<br>River Project were truly underway, the nation was in the throes of the Great<br>Depression.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt was already a fan of hydroelectricity. As<br>governor of New York, he was exposed to the pioneering Niagara Falls power plant<br>and pushed for other similar projects in that state. As President, his "New<br>Deal" naturally incorporated hydropower as well. By 1934, he had formed a<br>Regional Planning Commission that sketched out a series of dams along the<br>Columbia, two of which would become the Grand Coulee and the Bonneville. These<br>dams would produce a tremendous amount of electricity, and unlike in other<br>similar Corps of Engineers projects to date, that power would not all be<br>consumed by irrigation pumping. There was power to spare. To distribute that<br>power, the Regional Planning Commission suggested an independent government<br>agency on the model of the Panama Canal or the recently chartered Tennessee<br>Valley Authority.
As an interim measure, the loosely defined Bonneville Project coordinated the<br>civilian side of the Corps of Engineers project until 1938, when the Bonneville<br>Dam was complete and the Grand Coulee was much of the way there. The Bonneville<br>Dam captures little water in its reservoir, so while it does have flood control<br>value, electrical production is its primary purpose. The dam's two powerhouses<br>produce up to 1.2 GW, an impressive number for the 1930s but one that pales in<br>comparison to the Grand Coulee's eventual (1970s) full capacity of nearly 7 GW.<br>The Columbia River dams increased the electrical capacity of the Pacific<br>Northwest by orders of magnitude; the numbers were significant even at a<br>nationwide scale.
The bumper crop of electricity triggered a predictable controversy: what to do<br>with government power? One camp favored public control of the resource, with the<br>government marketing the power on some sort of equitable basis. The other<br>favored private control, arguing that the output of the dams should be<br>contracted entirely to private utilities like Portland General Electric (itself<br>the scion of an important early hydroelectric project at Willamette Falls). In<br>the New Deal political climate, the first camp won: the Columbia did not quite<br>get a TVA, but Congress did charter the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA),<br>the first of what would come to be known as Power Marketing Agencies. Over the<br>following decades, the BPA...