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Article: Northwest's cheap power comes under fire: For decades, Bonneville Power Association has supplied electricity to the Northwest. Now other regions want to share the wealth.(USA)
- Article from:
- The Christian Science Monitor
- Article date:
- February 14, 2001
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 The Christian Science Publishing Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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"Roll on, Columbia, roll on," sang Woody Guthrie. "Your power is turning our darkness to dawn." And so it's been in the 60 years since the folksinger extolled the dams, those concrete monoliths that turned a rushing river into a string of reservoirs as their massive turbines hummed to produce hydropower.
The electricity has come steady and cheap over the years, powering aluminum plants, pumping water to irrigate crops, lighting up cities and towns across an area the size of central Europe.
But now those federally built dams and the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), the government agency that markets their electricity, are under fire in a ...