Idaho Power Company Research Articles

Improving Abundance Estimates of Spring–Summer Snake River Chinook Salmon for Fisheries Management

AbstractThe Columbia River basin is home to a run of spring–summer Chinook Salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha that returns to the Snake River drainage of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington in the Pacific Northwest. Historically, the run was one of the more productive throughout the Columbia River basin. However, Snake River spring–summer Chinook Salmon have experienced declines in abundance due to overfishing, habitat degradation, and dams. Several stocks are listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and are supported by mitigation hatcheries funded by Idaho Power Company, the Lower Snake River Compensation Plan, and the Bonneville Power Administration. To maximize tribal and state harvest of returning hatchery adults, minimize impacts on wild fish, and ensure that enough hatchery fish return to meet broodstock needs, careful fisheries management is required. Since 2008, managers have used hatchery adults, PIT‐tagged as juveniles and detected at Lower Granite Dam, to generate adult abundance estimates. In season, these estimates inform state and tribal harvest shares and ensure that broodstock needs are met. Postseason, they provide smolt‐to‐adult survival and return rates. Since 2012, parentage‐based tagging (PBT) has provided an alternative method to estimate stock‐ and age‐specific returns at Lower Granite Dam, since returning hatchery adults sampled at Lower Granite Dam can be assigned to their parents. We compared stock‐specific abundance estimates between PIT‐ and PBT‐derived methodologies for return years 2016–2019. Across all years, PIT tag estimates accounted for 65% of the PBT‐based estimates at Lower Granite Dam across all age‐groups and release sites combined. This underrepresentation across all groups equated to 49,833 fish that were not accounted for in PIT tag abundance estimates. It is clear that PBT‐based estimates should aide in‐season harvest management and postseason run reconstruction to avoid the known bias of estimates from PIT tags, especially during years of low returns when increased accuracy is critical.

Analysis of controls for integrated energy storage system in energy arbitrage configuration with concrete thermal energy storage

Integrated energy systems (IES) are continuing to gain research support, as high-level studies indicate that systems integrating nuclear power, energy storage, and renewable sources can reduce carbon emissions and maintain grid stability. This paper details new modeling (written in the Modelica language) capable of dynamically measuring the system-wide feedback of a nuclear power plant (NPP) maneuvering through energy arbitrage. This is accomplished through integration with a thermal energy storage (TES) system via a novel turbomachinery model design that integrates seamlessly with standard fluid network analysis via conservation-law-based analysis. A new control system is implemented to enable the NPP modal operation to meet a 5-day power demand profile generated from Idaho Power Company data. Compared to scaling dispatchable power systems to maximum demand, 20% more power can be generated by using energy arbitrage over this dataset. These detailed physical models provide a novel confirmation of methods previously used to support nuclear IES.

Leeches of the Snake River in Idaho and Oregon: Paleodrainage Implications of Mooreobdella microstoma

Abstract Leech species of the mid-Snake River of Idaho and Oregon are described, and the distribution of the extant leech Mooreobdella microstoma Moore in the Snake River paleodrainage is delineated. Samples were collected from aquatic surveys in the Snake River using suction dredging by the Idaho Power Company and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation between 1995 and 2006. Supplementing these surveys, opportunities were provided for leech identification in water-quality analyses in Arizona and Wyoming and in other surveys in California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Eight species of leeches were found in the Snake River surveys. Erpobdella parva Moore was the most widely distributed species, occurring both above and below Shoshone Falls. Mooreobdella microstoma was widely distributed below Shoshone Falls. Other leech species were rare, although Helobdella stagnalis Linnaeus was very common above and less common below Shoshone Falls, a natural barrier to the anadromous fish. Mooreobdella microstoma is an extant sp...

Public Power, Private Dams: The Hells Canyon High Dam Controversy (review)

Reviewed by: Public Power, Private Dams: The Hells Canyon High Dam Controversy Todd Shallat (bio) Public Power, Private Dams: The Hells Canyon High Dam Controversy. By Karl Boyd Brooks . Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. Pp. xxvii+290. $35. Republican presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower called it "a massive Snake River monument to political maneuver and federal preemption." In 1952, in Hells Canyon on the Idaho-Oregon border, where government "power zealots" hoped to build the world's biggest dam, Eisenhower denounced the socialist thinking of New Deal federalism. To build a dam in the nation's deepest canyon would be "to make of the West a federal province and make its people economic dependents governed by remote control" (p. 177). Karl Boyd Brooks has written a masterful book about the politics of hydropower. From an era when western dams were symbols of technology's triumph comes a story of a bureaucratic defeat for bigger-is-better construction, a history that helps explain why whitewater still cascades through the Snake River basin and why hostility toward big government remains a raging pandemic in Idaho's Pacific Northwest. [End Page 873] Had Hells Canyon been most anywhere else in the nation it would have been dammed long before Eisenhower denounced the New Deal. Giant New Deal dams at Bonneville and Grand Coulee had already demonstrated that federal engineering could transform the Columbia basin with cut-rate hydropower. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and the Bonneville Power Administration saw Hells Canyon as the logical next step for the region's electrification. Upriver irrigators hoped the Hells Canyon High Dam might advance their plan to pipe water through an Idaho mountain, remaking the desert near Boise with 2,500 new farms. Downstream flood protection was another reason to dam the Snake at Hells Canyon. When a murderous 1948 flood hit Vanport, Oregon, President Harry Truman elevated the dam to a plank of his reelection campaign. But linking the dam to President Truman was problematic in a West turning away from New Deal federalism. The ideology pushing the Hells Canyon High Dam—the conviction that economic progress depended on maximum comprehensive development of every last puddle and pond—ran counter to rural suspicion of government experts and western resentment of eastern control. Private companies benefited. Idaho Power Company, a private utility, advanced a more modest plan for three low dams in Hells Canyon. The company tapped a deep vein of capitalist anger against twenty years of New Deal attempts to federalize the development of natural resources. By framing the controversy as local private enterprise versus federal interference, Idaho Power ultimately triumphed. In 1956, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed the company's three-dam plan. Today the controversy is nearly forgotten, but the story deserves to be read for insight into America's postwar fears of technocratic control. For Truman's Fair Deal Democrats, the fight was about cheap electricity, regional development, and the exploitation of corporate ownership. For Eisenhower Republicans, it was about the setting of limits on government's power. The dam-that-never-was became, says Brooks, "a national referendum on the New Deal's environmental heritage" (p. 22). The fight also helped pioneer the antifederalism of the future environmental movement. Before the opposition to dams was linked to the preservation of wild species and wild places, Hells Canyon tipped the balance of power. Eventually the dispute led to new legal definitions of the public interest that included protection for migrating fish. Public Power, Private Dams concludes with an irony that will appeal to historians of technology. The federal plan was massive enough to fully remake the wild region, slacking the river for ninety miles. Its defeat was so complete that the feds abandoned plans to dam neighboring streams. The Payette River was spared and so was the Salmon, Idaho's wilderness river, where raging water through granite chasms remains a vital lifeline for anadromous salmon and steelhead trout. Brooks believes that the single-minded [End Page 874] focus on dam building in Hells Canyon diverted money from projects in other places, delayed Idaho's urbanization, and saved the Salmon...

Optimizing Transmission Path Utilization in Idaho Power

A new line current profile based dynamic line rating system has been implemented at Idaho Power Company by real-time exchange of data with Energy Management System and real-time weather data from the Internet. Increased utilization of transmission critical path is made possible by wide-area real-time dynamic rating using Internet based weather data. Economic analysis shows significant benefit of operating transmission lines at higher ratings by taking advantage of favorable weather conditions during overload conditions. A case study of an internal transmission interface including the Brownlee East path in Idaho Power using the new dynamic line rating system and an associated overload mitigation system is presented. It is shown there is minimum risk of overloading a circuit by increased transmission path utilization under N-1 contingency conditions.

Cooperative Engineering Design Class Program for Industry and Universities

A program is described for economically investigating some engineering problems from industry which is intended to have a significant positive impact in engineering education. This cooperative program between Idaho Power Company and the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Idaho provides industry ideas and motivation for design projects undertaken by senior electrical engineering students. A description is given of how industry participates in this program, design project selection, engineering course objectives, and actual student design projects which have been accomplished in this program. >

Cooperative engineering design class program for industry and universities

A program is described for economically investigating some engineering problems from industry which is intended to have a significant positive impact in engineering education. This cooperative program between Idaho Power Company and the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Idaho provides industry ideas and motivation for design projects undertaken by senior electrical engineering students. A description is given of how industry participates in this program, design project selection, engineering course objectives, and actual student design projects which have been accomplished in this program.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Discharge Facilities at Hells Canyon Dam

Design of Hells Canyon Dam on the Snake River for the Idaho Power Company required careful consideration to arrangement in fitting the diversion, power and spillway facilities within the deep narrow gorge. Each feature arrangement is described. Hells Canyon Dam is a straight concrete gravity structure. The diversion tunnel is concrete lined and has a 40-ft diam horseshoe section, 1700 ft long to handle 60,000 cfs. The three-unit power plant with 391,500 KW nameplate capacity is notched into left abutment rock and overlaps the toe of the dam. Energy of 300,000 cfs discharge over the center section spillway is dissipated by a combination of concrete nappe deflectors and a submerged roller bucket. Fish trapping facilities adaptable to the 48-ft tailwater fluctuation consist of an aluminum barge floating in the tailrace.

Integration of Brownlee into the Idaho Power Company System

Integration of Brownlee into the Idaho Power Company System

The Possessive Apostrophe in Names

AN ASSOCIATED PRESS news item indicates that the conflict over Hell's Canyon has now spread from the issue of public versus private power to the question of the use of the apostrophe. Sam Fretwell, of Parma, Idaho, chairman of the Idaho-Oregon-Washington's Hell's Canyon Association, is quoted: 'We always spell it Hell's Canyon.' But Gilbert Stanton, public relations director for the Idaho Power Company, states: 'It's Hells Canyon as far as we're concerned.' Though indexed with an apostrophe, the titles collected in the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature display both forms. A check of seven periodicals during the first week of July, 1957, showed them preferring the form without the apostrophe five to two. The question whether to use an apostrophe in the names of cities, topographical features, colleges, books, magazines, associations, and businesses is indeed troublesome. A word of this kind may take an apostrophe, and then again it may not. Webster's New International (with the apostrophe) lists Devil's Bit Mountains and Devil's Island, but also Devils Lake and Devils Tower National Monument. Some conflict exists between forms recommended by standard reference works. The Columbia Lippincott Gazetteer of the World lists Devilsbit Mountains or Devil's Bit Mountains in that order, but Webster's Geographical Dictionary lists only Devil's Bit Mountains. Columbia lists Devils Island, Saint Mary's Peak (Australia), Kings Peak (Utah), and Land's End or Lands End; but Webster records Devil's Island, Saint Mary* Peak, King's Peak, and Lands End or Land's End.

The mountain Sheep — Pleasant valley project

The mountain sheep-pleasant valley project is located in the rugged, mountainous section of the Snake River, immediately downstream from the Idaho Power Company's Hell's Canyon site. The ultimate development will add 1,446 megawatts to the Northwest Power Pool which faces a possible shortage of power after 1960. The Pleasant Valley power plant (see Fig. 1) would have the third highest true-arch dam in the world, 534 feet, and would have generator units with a capability of 170,000 kilovolts each, larger than any present hydroelectric units. Application to build the two power plants was filed with the Federal Power Commission on September 7, 1955, by the Pacific Northwest Power Company.