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In the news: How the Pacific Northwest divvies up the benefits of limited federal hydropower

​Consumer-owned utility customers and BPA employees gather at the historic Minidoka Dam on the Snake River in Idaho after signing Provider of Choice contracts.
The Bulletin magazine features how BPA successfully navigated the challenges of developing the Provider of Choice long-term power sales contracts with its customers.
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Throughout the Provider of Choice process, we treated BPA as a true business partner.

Northwest Requirements Utilities Executive Director Zabyn Town
More than 130 public utilities, regional bodies and cooperatives constitute the Bonneville Power Administration's priority firm customers. This diverse group, spread across the Northwest, has diverse needs when it comes to procuring federal hydropower.

“Given this vast array of customers, a one-size-fits-all wholesale power product simply doesn't work," wrote BPA Policy Writer Katie Pruder Scruggs for the Bulletin, a magazine produced by the Northwest Public Power Association.

Pruder Scruggs' article, “Ensuring a fair share: How the Pacific Northwest divvies up the benefits of limited federal hydropower," discusses how BPA successfully navigated various customer needs by collaborating closely with them in a decades-long process that led to the development of the Provider of Choice long-term power sales contracts.

“Throughout the Provider of Choice process, we treated BPA as a true business partner," said Northwest Requirements Utilities Executive Director Zabyn Towner, as quoted in the article. “There were moments of disagreement, but we worked together to find fair solutions that benefited our members. The new Provider of Choice contracts will provide as much power supply and rate certainty as is reasonably possible for our utilities through 2044."

Read the article in the May 2026 edition of Bulletin, beginning on page 24.

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